About The Home Office
The Home Office is a key department within His Majesty’s Government with responsibility for national security, law and order, counter-terrorism, drugs policy, passports and immigration.
The Home office employs around 40,000 staff.
Key goals are to
- Cut crime and the harm it causes, including cyber-crime and serious and organised crime
- Manage civil emergencies within the remit of the Home Office
- Protect vulnerable people and communities
- Reduce terrorism
- Control migration
- Provide world-class public services and contribute to prosperity
- Maximise the benefits of the United Kingdom leaving the European Union
About Mastek
Mastek is an enterprise digital and cloud transformation specialist that engineers excellence for customers across 40 countries, including the UK, Europe, the US, the Middle East, Asia Pacific and India. We help enterprises navigate the digital landscape and stay competitive by unlocking the power of data, modernising applications and accelerating digital advantage for our customers.
Mastek is an AWS Advanced Partner delivering complex transformational programs on AWS. We help customers leverage the innate capabilities of AWS and build large-scale mission-critical applications. We take pride to be trusted by Public Sector organisations across the globe with programs of critical national importance.
The customer challenge
The National DNA Database (NDNAD) is used to store and match DNA profiles that enable the police to link an individual to a crime scene or to eliminate all individuals on NDNAD as potential suspects in crime. The legacy NDNAD system had been running using on premise hardware and software that needed replacing as the technology was ageing and it did not support 24/7 policing which required profile loading without manual intervention.
Home Office Biometrics required an Application and Platform Development partner to deliver a replacement database (NDNAD2) that is scalable, enables all the current functionality, and provides greater efficiency through the introduction of automation for end-to-end transactions.
Solution
To support ease of access to the data and for cost efficiencies, Cloud computing was adopted as the chosen strategy. NDNAD2 was implemented on the AWS platform, adopting a micro service architecture using services across availability zones within UK, for data sovereignty reasons.
The new solution is containerised and is orchestrated by ECS and is supported by an Aurora RDS. Cloud native services were adopted to perform Availability and Security monitoring, and Alerting functions. Build and deployment are executed by open-source tools.
Mastek are certified AWS implementation partner and trusted delivery supplier to Home Office. Fostering DevSecOps culture, Mastek developed the NDNAD2 system and its environments over AWS infrastructure. CI pipelines were set up undertaking delivery at-scale for the deployment of containerised production microservices on opensource cluster, securely hosted on AWS.
The delivery approach outlined by the Government Digital Service (GDS) is for an incremental, modular, and iterative delivery of the solution. This approach was tailored to meet the over-riding business need for a resilient and reliable solution to support the day-to-day operation of the service, ensuring the provision of information to support the investigation of crime.
Results and benefits
The business benefits of NDNAD2 include:
- Continuity in the provision of secure, assured, and legislatively compliant storage, search and matching of DNA profiles
- Improved resilience of the platform
- A more responsive and efficient service delivering full, end to end automation for routine business transactions, in key business areas
