Jim Harra, HM Revenue and Customs chief executive, has recently announced their five-year programme to migrate from an existing legacy data-centre infrastructure to a more-agile combination of Crown Hosting Data Centres and Cloud Services – provided by Amazon (AWS) and Microsoft (Azure).

The aim of the programme, according to Jim Harra (HMRC) is to secure the technical future of HMRC’s IT infrastructure by reducing the spend on non-government owned datacentres and migrating all the eligible remaining services to the cloud. The existing infrastructure, comprising of more than 600 different services, is ageing and increasingly out of support and IT estate.

Thanks to this migration project, Crown Hosting Data Centres will soon be the data centres partner of this cloud migration, enabling simplification of processes and a considerable reduction in the infrastructure costs.

In Harra’s words “The programme […] offers the highest potential to meet critical success factors and minimise IT delivery risk for HMRC, providing best value for money”.

Gemma Jeffries, Crown Hosting Data Centres Head of Client Engagement, added: “Data centre facilities from Crown Hosting continue to play a critical role in enabling digital transformation of the public sector, bridging the gap between on-premise IT and public cloud. HMRC IT located within Crown Hosting data centre facilities will be used to deliver citizen-facing services with improved flexibility, reliability, availability and security at significantly reduced costs and CO2 emissions”.