Ministry of Defence taps up Netcompany to support move away from legacy private cloud

 The Ministry of Defence (MoD) has moved nearly 50 more applications from a legacy private cloud environment to its MODCloud with the help of IT service provider Netcompany.

The MoD’s Defence Digital department is responsible for providing the defence community with access to certified and assured private and public cloud services from the likes of Amazon, Microsoft and Oracle through the MODCloud initiative.

The project is geared towards enabling the MoD to rationalise its datacentre estate and modernise its applications by moving more of them to the public cloud, which is a process it began in 2019.

In support of the endeavor, the MoD published a blog in November 2020 stating its stance on storing defence data classified as “official” in the public cloud, with the organisation stating that “in most circumstances we can do a better job of security in the cloud than we can do on-premise.”

According to Netcompany, it has assisted with the migration of 47 applications that are used by hundreds of thousands of users to the MODCloud, through a programme of work that saw it collaborate with the MoD Core Enabling Services team. 

“A key objective for the migration was to deliver greater flexibility to manage and engineer applications, enabling app owners to scale use, giving greater resilience and cyber security. It will also deliver significant cost savings to the taxpayer,” the company said in a statement.    

“It has added a layer of operational and strategic agility which will not only benefit the MoD on a day-to-day basis but will allow it to scale more easily in times of domestic or international crisis. Now the MoD is confident in its futureproofed capabilities and is better able to meet the demands of citizens as well as its armed forces and their families.”

In a statement to Computer Weekly, a spokesperson for the MoD said the project will benefit more than 330,000 users from across the defence community, while also providing them with “greater resilience and cyber security”.

The statement added: “This migration has been a great example of collaboration between all application owners, Army Digital Services, Defence Digital’s MODCloud team, and our delivery partner, Netcompany to enable this outcome.”

Richard Davies, UK country manager partner at Netcompany, said moving more of its applications and workloads to the public cloud would benefit the MoD in a variety of ways.

“Given our extensive industry and domain knowledge, as well as our strong track record, we understand the challenges that the MoD encounters daily, and as a result were able to assist in rapidly and successfully deploying their applications,” said Davies.

“Today it is vitally important that our armed forces are as efficient, productive and innovative as possible and moving to a public cloud infrastructure will deliver the flexibility and agility they need, both now and in the future.”