Hounslow Council partners with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to build resilience and transition away from legacy tech

Local government organizations face new and evolving challenges as they work to deliver a variety of key services to residents. The need to ensure their technology infrastructure is fit-for-purpose and able to support these services now and in the future is one area that can prove daunting and complex.

Hounslow Council is considered to be one of London’s most dynamic and forward-looking boroughs, with a diverse and rapidly growing population. It has spent the past two decades continually focusing on improving its IT estate through investment and modernization in order to fulfil its mission to deliver exceptional services to its 290,000 residents both now and in the future.

The council has been working with AWS to help achieve these goals, and in 2025, it completed the migration of all its on-premise servers to the AWS public cloud.

This has given the organization the opportunity to remove key workloads and tools from on-premise and embrace new digital opportunities in the future, according to Nicholas McCarthy, the council’s head of digital services.

“Only the people based in our main building are dependent on that building,” he says. “It’s very important for us to get more and more [workloads] into the cloud.”

Leaving a lasting legacy

Maintaining on-premise IT infrastructure poses immense challenges for an organisation that is striving to be leaner and more efficient. Chiefly, there is a huge capital cost incurred when replacing servers and racks every four to five years, alongside the cost of changes within the organisation. Moving to the cloud is not only more flexible, but it also introduces the ability to only pay for what is needed.

Many providers "force you down their route". But things were different with AWS, according to McCarthy. He adds that the flexibility to choose different options, alongside the cost efficiency – as well as the transparency of costs involved – were major reasons he counts on AWS as a trusted partner. Above all, however, training comes front and center; that's what "sold it for us".

While the team started the technical implementation in January 2025, the planning dates back to mid-2023. "We knew we had to do something. We either had to buy lots of servers and go through that pain, or go to the cloud," McCarthy explains. "Ultimately, staying on-prem didn't cost out, whichever way we looked at it."

Planning for bumps along the road

At first, his team didn't quite appreciate the magnitude of the changes this would entail. This realization came during the "landing zone" – technical sessions organised by AWS. Importantly, though, McCarthy remarks that these continuous opportunities and engagements were exactly why the council was so confident in moving forward with AWS.

Meanwhile, as a critical delivery agent of public services, Hounslow Council cannot afford downtime, but "you can't do this without downtime," according to McCarthy.

Another key challenge lay in reassuring other stakeholders that pursuing this migration was still a good idea – especially when there were some hurdles along the road or things took longer than originally expected.

Then there's the question of older systems, where the associated providers did not want workloads to be moved to the cloud. "They'll say it doesn't work in AWS, but here's a price for putting it into our cloud,” McCarthy explains.

"With this project, the downtime planning coordination has been a huge part," he adds. "We've got a board that meets every two weeks. We have a standup every Monday and Thursday, and I have a daily meeting with the leading manager."

But, as those with lots of experience know, the secret to success with technology deployments lies not just in the vendor’s solutions, but in how they can be a trusted partner to guide the business through both the rough and the smooth.

Working in partnership with AWS, McCarthy’s team overcame these hurdles and, in July, completed seven waves of server migrations and moved hundreds of workloads to the cloud.

Cloudy with a certainty of cost savings

A key benefit of AWS was tapping into the One Government Value Agreement (OGVA), which is an initiative that aggregates UK public sector spending to provide significant savings for ongoing projects and cloud commitments. The cost-efficiency led to significant volume-based discounts and a very large projected long-term saving over three years.

But it's not just about saving money, McCarthy stresses. The council’s relationship with AWS means it receives cloud credits, as well as architectural reviews every three months.

"It gives you access to really clever people at AWS about what the future looks like,” McCarthy adds.

“But you also have that regular contact with them directly – not just with a reseller – to make sure you're making the best of what you've got. For us, with our cyber challenges, we're really keen to make sure we're taking advantage of all the cyber tools that we can, to make sure that we can keep ahead of the game."

Looking to the future, McCarthy is excited by the way digital technology is changing how public services are delivered. In particular, he is positive that continuing to embrace the cloud will make lives better for the residents of Hounslow.

"Obviously, it's about having this kind of computing power that makes the small bits we've got to do in Hounslow a lot easier to do than if it had been on-prem,” he says.

“There's some really exciting stuff coming up over the next couple of years, so it's going to be a bit of a roller coaster as well at times."