The Bank of England needed to migrate legacy applications from ageing on-premise data centres to the cloud. Extending existing infrastructure was too costly and offered no return on investment. They recognised cloud as a strategic opportunity to reduce costs, improve resilience, and enable future services.

However, migrating at this scale raised critical organisational questions beyond pure technical feasibility. How would they ensure security and governance post-transition? Which applications should be prioritised and why? How could they maintain compliance throughout the process?

Unlike typical cloud migrations, the Bank couldn't afford to learn through failure. The organisation operated under strict regulatory constraints and couldn't risk security breaches or service disruption. Execution had to be flawless from day one, with zero tolerance for error.

Appvia had already proven itself as a trusted technical delivery partner within the organisation on a previous project. With this in mind, teams approached us to strategise and execute their cloud migration, amend governance processes and introduce best-practices. We needed to also train, up-skill and transfer this best-practice knowledge to in-house teams to ensure continual delivery, post-migration.

‍The Appvia team consisted of engineering and delivery professionals, embedded into the organisation to collaborate with cyber security, service management, architecture and finance. Together they designed, built and implemented the following in Microsoft Azure:

‍A secure landing zone
Providing a single location for user interaction and a solid foundation for the
proper use of cloud technology. A secure landing zone allows for extensions and future growth.

‍An on-boarding mechanism for applications
Rather than each application having its own approach to build and deployment, we implemented a common CI/CD process. This technique ensures security will be incorporated into the applications as early as possible in the build process

‍Containerisation
Having introduced a new application development paradigm for cloud, we further refined it to include containerisation.

‍Training
We provided several courses in various topics including Git, Kubernetes and Helm. The training consisted of instructor-led classroom sessions complemented by self-serve exercises for delegates to complete at their own pace.

The Bank of England's cloud strategy is now mature, future-proof and based on solid security guidelines and best practices for Microsoft Azure.

Our journey with this customer didn’t end there, we are now helping them to realise their full potential with other processes. For example, we are working with them to implement a scalable, secure way to master Machine Learning, using Kubeflow and Azure batch. Analysis that used to take 20 days to accomplish can now be completed in half an hour.