Highways England signs with Advanced for four-year Infrastructure-as-a-Service deal to better manage 'smart motorways'

Highways England turns to Advanced to host the infrastructure managing the data from more than 40,000 roadside sensors

Highways England has signed a four-year deal with IT services company Advanced to better manage its network of 40,000 roadside traffic management devices, a system designed to alert road users of potential traffic problems, such as accidents and congestion.

Advanced is providing the mission-critical IT infrastructure for hosting Highways England's Advanced Traffic Management System in a deal valued at more than £6.7m.

The move is the latest development in the Highways England's Smart Motorways programme, which uses software from Bath-based IPL to manage sensors and other devices across the UK's roads network.

According to Advanced, the aim of the cloud migration is to provide a smoother, smarter and more sustainable road network across the country. Highways England will be using Advanced's Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) environment in order to cut the cost and complexity of managing the IT infrastructure the system requires.

The contract starts immediately, and represents a continuation of the public-sector organisation's strategic business plan of April 2015.

The company claims that it was selected as Highways England's technology partner to deliver a "tailored approach incorporating all the mission-critical services [encompassing] 24-by-7 infrastructure management, backup and disaster recovery services in the event of an emergency, while also being agile enough to embrace ongoing innovation".

It continued: "All services are underpinned by a robust service level agreement (SLA) and meet stringent recovery time objective (RTO), recovery point objective (RPO), and round-trip time (RTT) requirements".

The emphasis on these metrics in the contract highlight the importance that Highways England placed on high availability and minimising downtime.

Advanced managing director, IT services, Roy Wood described it as "an incredible accolade for our safe and secure approach to management services", adding: "There was a good cultural fit between the two teams from the outset and everyone involved is looking forward to getting this major project underway."

According to Highways England's technical project manager for the traffic management systems, Russell Mead, the organisation wants to roll-out more sensors across the network to get more, and more granular, traffic-flow and other information.

Highways England - formerly known as the Highways Agency - has also worked with the IT services arm of BAE Systems to deliver service integration and application management (SIAM) systems across the organisation.

It has also invested £100m in projects to map cycle hotspots around the UK for the purpose of prioritising improvements to cycle highways where they will actually be used.