The UK's tax department is around 70 percent through its cloud migration process.
As shared in HM Revenue and Customs' (HMRC) annual report for FY24, the department is making good progress in moving workloads out of its legacy data centers and into the cloud.
First reported by Public Technology (PT), HMRC is in the process of moving more than 500 IT services that makeup what it calls "critical national infrastructure" out of its legacy data centers and into the cloud.
The department has been working on a cloud migration for the past three years, with some services receiving remedial work to modernize them, and others being decommissioned.
In 2021, HMRC said it had “600 services hosted on over 7,000 servers in legacy data centers.” The latest update states that by the end of 2023/2024, HMRC had "successfully migrated 372 of 545 critical services, with 49 remediated."
Among those migrated were the National Insurance and Pay-as-you-Earn System which is used by 40,000 colleagues and has more than 100 million accounts with 10 million daily transactions. The report adds: "Changes like this enable us to build and run more resilient services for our customers and quickly adapt to meet changes in demand.”
The migration is part of HMRC's Technical Health Program, a £500m ($640.9m) initiative tackling legacy technology and improving cyber resilience. This will focus on remediating HMRC's "highest-priority IT issues."
The document adds: "To help protect our customers and colleagues, for example, we are focused on migrating our critical national infrastructure to [the] cloud and Crown Hosting, to address potential vulnerabilities within our IT estate and increase the stability, security, and overall efficiency of our IT systems, services, and platforms.”
In 2023, HMRC signed a £4.4 million mainframe deal with Kyndryl that would see the IBM spin-off managing the departments' mainframe services and helping the department to prepare for the cloud migration.
That contract, signed in September 2023, is set to last 15 months and come to a close at the end of this year.
In March 2024, HMRC committed to replacing its Customs Handling of Import and Export Freight System (CHIEF).
The CHIEF service was first introduced in 1994 and was managed by BT until 2010. Following that, it was taken over by a collaboration between Capgemini, Fujitsu, and HMRC called Aspire until 2017, when HMRC took over management in-house.
A new system, the Customers Declaration System, described as a modern, secure IT platform supporting businesses to make import and export declarations into and out of the UK, was implemented in June 2024.
