Facing a major building relocation, ageing on-premise infrastructure, and rising expectations around availability, Brentwood Borough Council took the opportunity to rethink how its IT services were delivered. With limited time and no tolerance for disruption, the focus was on simplifying complexity, improving resilience, and creating a modern platform that could support staff and services across multiple locations.
At a glance
- UK local authority supporting ~300 staff
- Town Hall relocation requiring infrastructure to be moved
- Ageing on-premise servers and disaster recovery environment
- Small internal IT team with increasing availability demands
The challenge
The Council needed to vacate its Town Hall for refurbishment, meaning all on-premise infrastructure had to be relocated within a strict timeframe. At the same time, core systems were approaching end of life, disaster recovery arrangements were increasingly costly, and expectations around 24/7 service availability were growing.
Continuing to invest in physical infrastructure would increase risk and complexity, but downtime or service disruption was not an option for a public-facing organisation.
The approach
Following a successful pilot, the decision was made to move core server infrastructure to Microsoft Azure. This reduced dependency on physical locations and simplified the underlying network estate.
At the same time, Azure-based backup and recovery services were introduced to strengthen resilience and reduce the need for a secondary disaster recovery site. The combined approach allowed the Council to move from a reactive support model to a more proactive, resilient design without expanding its on-premise footprint.
A cloud specialist worked alongside the Council’s internal IT team throughout the project to ensure delivery against tight timelines and support a smooth transition.
The outcome
- Successful migration of core systems to Microsoft Azure
- Secure access for staff across multiple sites and devices
- Reduced reliance on ageing on-premise infrastructure
- Improved resilience and isolation of outages
- Smaller physical data centre footprint and lower support costs
- Greater confidence for a lean IT team supporting critical services
Why this matters
- Cloud migration can remove constraints created by physical buildings
- Resilience can be designed in, not bolted on
- Simplification reduces both operational risk and cost
- Public sector IT benefits from proactive, scalable service models
