• Government

HMRC Borders and Trade: Delivering Critical National Infrastructure through a modern DevOps platform

77%

faster to deploy an application

£2.25m

estimated savings per year

30%

reduction in cloud consumption costs

Synopsis

Tecknuovo built a container platform to help HMRC’s Borders and Trade deliver Critical National Infrastructure more quickly, securely, and time-efficiently. The platform lets teams deliver applications 77% faster by using standardised patterns. The patterns are infinitely repeatable, promising exponential value across Borders and Trade, HMRC, and wider government.

As part of the engagement Tecknuovo created an application services guardrail, a library of patterns and knowledge management, and transfer to support Zero Dependency. The centre of excellence has helped drive standards, best practice and tooling for HMRC Borders and Trade.

The Challenge

Each time HMRC’s Borders and Trade had a new requirement, it was creating a team to build a new application and platform to run it through — fully from scratch.

This was time-consuming and happening in parallel instances across Borders and Trade. Teams were building near-identical solutions, reinventing the wheel to solve similar challenges. This was costing time and resource, and created governance and compliance risks which were difficult to monitor in the sprawling multi-platform environment.

Solving Today

A lightweight and flexible solution

Tecknuovo proposed to build a cloud-based container platform that would let tenants (projects and functions within Borders and Trade) build and deploy their applications through one centralised and standardised platform.

We chose a container platform as containers are extremely lightweight, taking up minimal space and booting quickly. Containerised applications are also easier to manage, more flexible, quicker to deliver, and more secure than virtualised applications.

The platform gives tenants standardised patterns for building applications, developing test automation frameworks for them, and deploying them.

Delivering efficiently

To save on time and resource, we built the platform from other components already in use at HMRC, including its AWS platform, CI/CD (Continuous Integration Continuous Development), secret storage service, and security service.

We worked closely with tenants from the outset to incorporate their feedback into the build to make sure it accurately met their requirements, and to save time by making agile, iterative changes.

Building Tomorrow

Repeatable architecture and tooling

Standardisation and repeatability are the platform’s core characteristics. It gives tenants a blueprint for building and deploying an application, integrating necessary products from outside of Borders and Trade into a set of centralised platform services for building applications. This includes infrastructure and tooling configuration, guidelines on implementation, and standards on governance and environments.

As long as it’s containerised, any application can be built and run on the platform. And because it’s a centralised resource, it needs just one team to maintain it and provide tenants with support.

This means the platform can be used across Borders and Trade, HMRC, and wider government, promising exponential efficiency gains and savings on taxpayers’ money.

We designed the technical documentation and knowledge around the platform to be easily transferrable to HMRC’s teams. We did this by working closely with guilds, making sure the design aligned with HMRC’s and teams’ ways of working.

Results

Fast delivery, huge cost savings

Building and running these applications through the centralised platform has sped up deployment and slashed costs significantly:

  • Teams can deploy applications 77% faster — in 10 weeks down from 10 months.
  • Teams can build testing automation frameworks 71% faster — in four weeks down from 14.
  • This means the platform is estimated to save £2.25m per onboarded tenant.
  • Matured FinOps has enabled a 30% reduction in cloud consumption costs.

Delivering Critical National Infrastructure

Four tenants have successfully onboarded to the platform. They are all pieces of Critical National Infrastructure (CNI) that need to run meticulously to monitor and safeguard trade through the UK’s borders.

  • New Computerised Transit System (NCTS): a system for making transit declarations for goods moving between the UK, EU, and other common transit countries.
  • Excise Movement and Control System (EMCS): a UK and EU-wide system for recording the movement of duty-suspended excise goods (goods that become subject to per unit tax at the point of sale, such as tobacco and alcohol).
  • Excise Trader Data System (ETDS): a system that lets buyers validate authorisations on traders before letting them move excise goods under duty suspension.
  • Automated Direct Debit Instruction Service (AUDDIS): a function that automates the transfer of direct debit instructions between HMRC and payment service providers, saving time for internal teams and users.

Focus on NCTS: New Computerised Transit System

The Challenge

The New Computerised Transit System (NCTS) is a Critical National Infrastructure (CNI) system within HMRC’s Borders and Trade. It lets traders process goods moving through UK borders under the Common Transit Convention, delaying import declarations and duties until the goods reach their destination.

The NCTS has been operational since 2003. It has gone through multiple iterations to improve operations and comply with new requirements. In previous iterations, this work was taking up months of resource every time.

The Solution

Tecknuovo’s central HAWK supported the NCTS team as they used the HAWK platform to build and deploy the new NCTS application. The team deployed the new application quickly, easily, and securely, thanks to the pre-approved and standardised tools, processes and guardrails offered by the HAWK platform.

The Results

The HAWK-deployed new iteration of NCTS is now supporting a live piece of CNI that’s helping Borders and Trade seamlessly manage goods transiting between the UK and EU.

Running on the HAWK platform will improve future iterations of the NCTS too — in terms of the application’s efficiency and the ease of building and deploying. It will let teams quickly and easily modernise the application, minimise downtime through blue green deployment patterns, and manage cost through improved FinOps practices.

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“The team have been fantastic again, I can’t express how much value you all add. I honestly feel as a group it is the best working collaboration I’ve seen in a long time and long may it continue.”

Supplier Manager, Central Gov