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Transitioning Ministry of Justice legacy technology to a modern cloud SaaS

Migrating legacy CJSE onto a modern Software as a Service solution and providing ongoing support and service improvements.

“The transition to the Q-Solution SaaS service has been a huge success for the CJSE.  Not only did we reduce the overall run costs for the service, but we also removed a significant portion of our technical debt and with it, a number of associated risks.”

Dom Tomkins, Ministry of Justice Service Owner

The Project

The Criminal Justice System Exchange (CJSE) manages the delivery of approximately 200,000 digital case files a day between all 43 police forces within England and Wales as well as CPS, HMCTS, Home Office, DVLA and other public bodies. The system sits at the heart of the Criminal Justice System. Our Secure Messaging as a Service SaaS built on AWS was selected to replace the legacy technology architecture and to move to a more value for money consumption model.

The Approach

We worked with the customer to demonstrate the features that the Secure Messaging as a Service provided out of the box.  These included:

  • Application and Infrastructure Protective Monitoring using Sentinel
  • System Monitoring using CloudWatch
  • Message processing using AWS serverless technology such as Lamdba, SQS, DynamoDB and S3

We then planned the transition of the existing service to our new platform including the migration of data, transfer of IP addresses and communication channels to ensure the cutover was a transparent process for the customers users.

Finally we wanted to ensure that the customer had access to the information they needed to monitor and measure the service we were providing in real time.  We did this by:

  • Used AWS QuickSight to provide system usage Management Information such as volumes of message by source and destination
  • Developed accessible System Monitoring dashboard using Grafana
  • Developed a Status Page portal for customer to view any planned maintenance and see any current incidents being managed
  • Granted access for the customers cyber team to Wiz that provides an overarching security assessment in real time of the security posture of the solution

The Outcomes

The service was transitioned seamlessly and transparently for the end users.

We make regular improvements to the service to add new features, respond to change requests and ensure the solution remains patched to the very latest security levels. We are able to deploy changes at any time without disruption to service through our CI/CD pipeline.

The Ministry of Justice now has real time access to Management Information and service performance reports. Through the use of AWS QuickSight we are able to customise reports and generate new reports to meet a particular business need in minutes.