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HM Courts &
Tribunals Service

When HM Courts and Tribunals Service needed to connect a complex, multi-cloud estate to legacy infrastructure as part of a £1 billion justice reform programme, a traditional telco provider would have taken up to 12 months to provision. Cloud Gateway reduced that provisioning time from 90 days to 90 minutes – giving HMCTS the agility to deploy new citizen-facing services across Azure, Google Cloud, AWS, and the Public Services Network without unnecessary delay, cost, or disruption.

From 90 days
to 90 minutes

With a traditional telco, connecting Azure to our on-premise estate would have taken the best part of a year. Cloud Gateway had us live in minutes. That speed directly changed what we could deliver and when we could deliver it. When you're running a reform programme at this scale, across this many cloud environments, you need a networking partner that can keep pace. Cloud Gateway does.

HM Couurts & tribunals service

The challenge

HMCTS’s £1 billion reform programme – launched in 2016 with the Ministry of Justice and the senior judiciary – set out to replace paper-based and outdated digital systems with modern, cloud-hosted alternatives. To deliver the latest phase, HMCTS needed to connect their legacy infrastructure to Azure to deploy Windows Virtual Desktop, and separately to Google Cloud Platform to upgrade their virtual stenographer solution, a system that stores and optimises sensitive court audio recordings.

Connecting Azure back to physical sites through a traditional telco provider would have taken up to 12 months and incurred significant cost. HMCTS needed a faster, more flexible path – one that could handle multiple cloud environments simultaneously and maintain consistent security policy across all of them.

HMCTS engaged Cloud Gateway having been introduced through colleagues in the Ministry of Justice, who were already familiar with our cloud networking capability.

What we did

With an existing presence in ARK government data centres, we were able to link a new platform instance to HMCTS’s on-campus environment and through to their Azure tenancy in a matter of minutes from first connection.

From there, the platform grew alongside the HMCTS reform programme – adding connections to AWS, the Public Services Network, and third-party data centre providers as the programme demanded. All traffic crossing the platform is sanitised by Cloud Gateway’s SSE Core, regardless of source – whether a Ministry of Justice cloud environment, a physical government site, or a remote user working from home.

The platform is PSN accredited and NCSC compliant. Cloud Gateway holds ISO 27001 and Cyber Essentials PLUS credentials.

Provisioning times across the programme were reduced from 90 days to 90 minutes – and in some cases faster.

The impact

Provisioning time reduced from 90 days to 90 minutes across the programme
Multi-cloud estate connected – Azure, Google Cloud Platform, AWS, PSN, and legacy infrastructure – under consistent security policy
New citizen-facing services deployable in a fraction of the time previously required
HMCTS able to eliminate or migrate costly legacy IT processes, reducing ongoing maintenance spend
Remote and on-site staff access the same services under the same security policy, regardless of location
Platform is vendor-agnostic – new cloud providers or services can be added on demand as the reform programme evolves