PA Consulting shares how it helped the Home Office optimise cost savings in moving two of its directorates to the cloud
The UK Visas & Immigration and Immigration Enforcement directorates of the Home Office are transforming their services. They’ve moved the visa application service to a new cloud provider. This award-winning work delivered many benefits. For example it’s now faster and easier for people to apply online and for the Home Office to process applications.
The Home Office wanted to get maximum value from the new infrastructure – and were aiming to optimise costs by more than 40 per cent. In six weeks, we put them on course to achieve that.
We studied billing performance data and combined this with detailed knowledge of how the Home Office was using its cloud servers. Then we made sure they were using only the computing capacity they needed. To do that, we used our cloud optimisation tool to:
- Switch capacity on only when needed
- Resize the resources the Home Office has running in the cloud to make sure they’re not oversized – and overpriced
- Commit to use a certain amount of capacity for 12/36 months at a time. This ‘reservation’ fixes costs while making sure the organisation has enough computing power to cover every situation.
Our work identified more than 40 per cent of cost savings. They could bring savings worth £2 million a year, meaning the Home Office would exceed their target. We’ve also developed a dashboard where they can see in more detail what costs they’re running up and how – and spot opportunities to save.
“PA helped us derive maximum value out of the new infrastructure platform. PA leveraged its cloud optimisation capability to identify opportunities to save costs by rightsizing our infrastructure resources and to make the infrastructure costs visible to our delivery teams which helped drive right behaviours. With PA’s continued support we identified more than 40 per cent of cost savings which could bring savings worth £2 million a year. Not only has PA excelled in transforming our infrastructure they have now proven themselves to be able to drive improvement, optimisation and continue to be a highly valued partner.” - Ian Phoenix, Immigration Technologies Platform (IPT) Programme Delivery Lead, Home Office