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Dept for Environment,
Food & Rural Affairs

The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) needed to retain uninterrupted access to Public Services Network applications across its agencies while simultaneously accelerating cloud adoption in line with the government’s Cloud First policy. Cloud Gateway provided PSN and multi-cloud connectivity with 99.9% availability – replacing legacy infrastructure that had been ineffective and costly to maintain, and giving Defra the agility to consume new cloud services from any provider without renegotiating contracts or changing architecture.

Connecting legacy infrastructure
to modern cloud services

Defra's transformation agenda requires us to move quickly on cloud adoption while maintaining the secure connectivity our agencies depend on day to day. Legacy infrastructure was making that increasingly difficult - it was costly, inflexible, and not built for the pace of change we needed. Cloud Gateway gave us PSN continuity and cloud access without disruption, and without locking us into a single provider or architecture. That flexibility matters to a department of our scale and complexity.

The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs

The challenge

Defra and its agencies have an ongoing requirement to access applications and systems via the PSN – the pan-government network for secure information sharing. At the same time, the government’s Cloud First policy and Defra’s own 25-year environment plan require the department to migrate services and infrastructure to the cloud, reducing costs and improving environmental performance.

The challenge is that these two requirements – PSN continuity and cloud acceleration – are difficult to serve simultaneously with legacy network infrastructure. Existing PSN connectivity was costly to run, difficult to adapt, and increasingly misaligned with the pace of transformation Defra needed.

What we did

Cloud Gateway provided instant, secure access to the PSN and a full range of cloud service providers – meaning Defra could begin consuming new and existing cloud services without delay or disruption to existing PSN-dependent operations.

Our cloud-native platform updated, consolidated, and replaced legacy infrastructure, connecting Defra’s IT estate – including their presence in Crown Hosting Data Centres – to the cloud. The Cloud Gateway portal provides full real-time visibility of network performance, security incidents, and user activity across the estate.

The impact

PSN access maintained continuously across Defra agencies – no disruption during transition from legacy infrastructure
Secure access to cloud services from any provider, on demand, without architecture changes or contract renegotiation
Real-time visibility of network performance and security incidents across the estate
Legacy infrastructure retired, reducing ongoing maintenance cost to the taxpayer