Boosting productivity through replatforming
The client is a large public sector organisation responsible for safeguarding critical national data and delivering services to millions of people. It has an ambitious digital transformation programme aimed at improving efficiency, security and user experience across its operations.
One of its key challenges was an ageing internal application used by thousands of staff to process customer requests. The system was built on technologies that were no longer widely supported, creating risks around maintainability and performance. Productivity was being hampered by outdated user interfaces and inefficient workflows. Without intervention, these issues would have continued to slow down service delivery, increase operational costs and limit the organisation’s ability to meet its transformation goals.
How we leveraged AWS for the client
Scott Logic was engaged to refresh the technology stack and improve the user experience. Initially, the scope was to migrate screen input components from an old technology interface to a GOV.UK-compliant framework.
However, early engagement revealed an opportunity to add significant value by streamlining the user experience at the same time. Working closely with the customer’s design team, we prioritised interface improvements that would deliver the greatest benefit with minimal effort.
Delivery followed an agile, collaborative approach, with iterative design, prototyping and testing to ensure the new interface met accessibility and usability standards.
We delivered the solution on AWS to provide a secure, scalable and resilient platform. We replaced legacy on-premise SOAP APIs with modern RESTful APIs using Amazon API Gateway, supported by AWS Lambda for event-driven processing and Amazon EC2 (via OpenShift) for containerised workloads with autoscaling and health checks.
Amazon RDS (PostgreSQL) ensures reliable, high-availability database operations, while Amazon ElastiCache (Redis) improves performance through fast in-memory caching. Durable messaging is handled by Amazon MQ (RabbitMQ), enabling asynchronous processing and fault tolerance.
We met storage and compliance needs using Amazon S3, enhanced with Amazon GuardDuty for antivirus scanning. Security is strengthened through private VPC endpoints, security groups, AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), AWS Key Management Service (KMS) for encryption and AWS Secrets Manager for credential protection. Operational visibility is provided by AWS CloudWatch, ensuring proactive monitoring and alerting.
We designed the architecture for high availability across multiple Availability Zones, with no single points of failure and with automated failover tested before go-live. Scalability is built in through Lambda, S3 and autoscaling policies within OpenShift, supported by performance testing to handle peak loads. Combined with robust security and resilience measures, the solution delivers a future-proof platform that improves reliability, efficiency and user experience.
We also ensured compliance with Government Digital Service (GDS) standards and WCAG accessibility guidelines, even though the system was internal-facing. A practical handover was provided to the client's in-house teams, including knowledge transfer and delegation of lower-priority tasks, ensuring long-term maintainability and reducing risk.
The outcomes
The main outcome was a modern, accessible interface that significantly improved productivity for thousands of staff. Combined with process automation delivered by other teams, the changes enabled faster case handling and reduced operational overheads.
By adopting AWS cloud services, the organisation achieved a secure, scalable and future-proof solution that supports its wider digital transformation objectives.
