The Scottish Government’s Digital Directorate has run the first pilot in its programme to help government bodies migrate applications, data and workloads to the SG Cloud Platform.
It is also in the early stages of the second pilot, according to a blogpost by its cloud and digital services division.
The first move has involved moving applications for the R100 team, which is working on connecting every premise in Scotland with broadband of at least 30Mbps, to a platform hosted by AWS. It has been delivered in a partnership with IT service provider Leidos, although the decision has said it plans to work with others in taking the programme forwards.
This involved supporting R100 through a series of steps, including developing a business case for cloud, selecting the IT service provider, upskilling the team in agile working, establishing a technical design and managing the onboarding to the platform
The team is now planning a second pilot and, over the course of this year, is aiming to complete the alpha phase of the programme, define a delivery roadmap and develop a sustainable operation model.
Service design support
Ross Lyon, product manager for cloud first in the cloud and digital services division, told UKAuthority the the migration is not a ‘lift and shift’ approach but looking at service design and helping organisations to understand how a service and its applications can be transferred to a ‘cloud first’ and ‘cloud native’ build.
It then involves shifting the service to a “landing zone” from suppliers.
“We have already established an AWS element to that. We’ve established this as a baseline environment with guardrails and security service wrappers around it, to enable other organisations from the public sector to land their applications and workloads on it,” Lyon said. “They are responsible for that part and we are managing the underlying infrastructure.”
The launch of the service for R100 has effectively taken the AWS element into its private beta phase, and a discovery phase has been completed for a Microsoft Azure environment that will provide another option.
“They come with wrappered services around them,” he said. “It is not just the establishment of the underlying platform, it also covers identity and access management, networking, cyber security monitoring, managing billing and looking at pricing discounts for the public sector.”
