Natural Resources Wales embraces the cloud for infrastructure support and IT self-service

The Welsh government’s environment adviser is to migrate disaster recovery and application and infrastructure support to the cloud in a bid to consolidate its separate systems.

Natural Resources Wales (NRW) is to move to a fully cloud-based Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system from Trustmarque, building on work to combine separate systems into a single IT estate. 

The decision follows NRW’s formation from a number of separate bodies including the Countryside Council for Wales, Forestry Commission Wales and the Environment Agency in Wales.

NRW selected Trustmarque via G-Cloud to implement Unit4 as its new ERP platform and to consolidate the ERP systems it was using for finance and HR onto a single platform. This was undertaken as part of a two-year contract extension with the firm to provide full disaster recovery, and application and infrastructure support.

It said that while ERP was the main focus of the move to the cloud, the step would also allow the creation of a new self-service portal, “MyNRW”, for the organisation’s 2,000 employees to carry out tasks such as updating personal details or access digital payslips.


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“The creation of NRW resulted in a complex and disparate IT estate, and over the past two years Trustmarque has helped us effectively simplify it,” said Paul Subacchi, NRW’s head of business support services. 

“Our ERP system is absolutely critical to the organisation, enabling us to become more efficient and offer greater self-service functionality to our employees.

“Cloud is a significant part of our IT strategy, so we need a platform that is available, resilient, flexible and secure to deliver our ERP system.”

The Trustmarque Cloud is accredited to manage systems and data operating at “Official-Sensitive” level and which require connectivity to the Public Services Network (PSN). Trustmarque said its cloud is “accredited for use in the public sector, surpassing the minimum security standards the NRW was looking for.”

“The level of security was important to NRW, as its ERP holds considerable amounts of sensitive data, including employee, supplier and partner information,” Trustmarque said in a statement. 

The original ERP systems had been delivered through a combination of cloud, on-premises and managed services. 

As part of the contract, Trustmarque is also managing the software licensing of Unit4 for NRW, simplifying its infrastructure licensing requirements and taking the responsibility for ensuring compliance.

Jim Dunton

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