Department for Transport to go all-Google for cloud-first digital transformation from 2020

DfT plans to go cloud first from 2020

The Department for Transport has gone with Google Cloud as part of a digital transformation project and drive to become ‘cloud first' from 2020.

It follows a two-year project with Google to "reinvent its internal service delivery", which has involved the migration during 2019 of hundreds of virtual machines and applications to the Google Cloud.

The digital transformation project is part of a modernisation of the organisation's technology stack, intended to make it easier and quicker for the Department for Transport (DfT) to roll-out new applications and services.

Their data centres also lacked the scalability to match DfT's longer-term needs as it looked to undertake bigger and more complex data initiatives

"Prior to moving to the cloud, it was resource-intensive for DfT to maintain servers, manage backups and ensure the overall health of the IT systems, and simple utilisation and querying tasks often required days to complete.

"Their data centres also lacked the scalability to match DfT's longer-term needs as it looked to undertake bigger and more complex data initiatives," claims Mark Palmer, head of public sector, UK and Ireland, at Google Cloud.

The first applications to be migrated to the Google Cloud were shifted in March this year, with the DfT's LENNON application - Latest Earnings Networked Nationally Overnight - moved in a six-month operation. LENNON is used in the rail industry to provide operational data to operators, such as ticket sales and franchise earnings.

Before the move, Google claims that it took DfT staff as much as five days to run searches on the 100-terabyte customised database - although the DfT only suggests "several hours". Following migration to an internal cluster running on Google's BigQuery cloud data warehouse, that has been brought down "to a matter of seconds", according to Palmer.

In addition, according to the DfT, "backups and maintenance on Google Cloud should be ‘frictionless'. By comparison, the current application requires frequent manual intervention from the colleagues using it. Moving it to Google Cloud will free up time and resources that could be better used elsewhere. The transformation should also increase the security of the application."

The capabilities the platform offers are helping us to utilise data better to support decision-making, policy-making, reporting and governance

Much of the DfT's internal applications have been shifted throughout the year following the LENNON migration.

Other applications moved include road transportation analytics system Journey Time Statistics, "re-platformed as a proof of concept to infrastructure as a service through Google's Compute Engine to give the team more flexible and scalable compute capabilities", according to Palmer.

He added: "Through leveraging VMs with greater CPU, memory and disk performance, the time taken to complete analytics jobs performed by the system were reduced significantly, allowing the team to iterate and generate their statistical outputs faster."

When the shift is complete, interim CIO at the DfT, Mark Lyons, expects the organisation to undertake new applications taking in image recognition and internal performance management systems.

"The capabilities the [Google Cloud] platform offers are helping us to utilise data better to support decision-making, policy-making, reporting and governance, as well as provide new digital services to engage with citizens on transport related initiatives," said Lyons.