04 April 2019

The Department for Transport (DfT) has shifted its first in-house application to the Google Cloud Platform, which is the start of a much broader migration process.

It has moved its version of the LENNON application (Latest Earnings Networked Nationally Overnight) to the platform as a first step in a six-month transformation process. LENNON is used by the railway industry.

The plan was outlined in a blogpost by Luke Radford, head of CIO Advisory at the DfT. Radford said that it followed a discovery exercise with Google and was part of a move to close the department’s data centres.

Digital staff has been working with the DfT’s rail technical and data management team, Google and its partner Cloud Technology Solutions on migrating the LENNON system.

While the project is still in progress, processing speeds have been dramatically reduced with the time taken to execute a query cut from hours to less than 20 seconds. It is also making it possible to run multiple queries simultaneously. Radford said the cloud version should free up a lot of time, improve security and provide for frictionless back-ups and maintenance.

“For DfT’s Digital Service, this project has demonstrated some huge benefits of using Google Cloud Platform,” Radford said. “I hope and expect that this experience will enable us to further improve our efficiency through the transformation of similar applications.”