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HM Revenue and Customs is pressing ahead with a major move towards the use of cloud services and has agreed a deal to work with a migration expert.

The tax agency has tasked Belfast-based digital transformation firm Kainos with providing “specialist migration services”. The two parties have signed a year-long contract that took effect this week.

The deal relates to the department’s Securing Our Technical Future project, which is a “three-year programme to migrate HMRC services from Fujitsu datacentres to the public cloud and private crown environments”.

Kainos has been asked to help “define HMRC’s approach and strategy… for [the] move to cloud [and] to build and seed a testing plan strategy”.

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Services provided by the firm will include “specialist migration testing of the application estate” of the department to ensure it is ready to move from HMRC’s premises to a cloud environment of Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services.

The initial stages of work are due to be conducted across seven sprints, beginning with an exercise to “agree backlog and plan” and concluding the development of a “test execution service and governance model”.

The Kainos contract runs until 31 July 2020, with an option to extend the deal by a further 12 months. If more support is required beyond summer 2021, “the parties will work together to facilitate this”.

 HMRC plans to complete cloud migration by June 2022.

The Securing Our Technical Future project is one of a number of programmes of work that have been impacted by HMRC’s Brexit-related work. 

A year ago, the department revealed that more than 100 transformation projects had been stopped, paused, or merged. Others were reshaped or reviewed – including the cloud migration scheme which, as of July 2018, was “being reconsidered”.