UK justice system unplugs from ancient datacenters after five-year slog

The courts system in England and Wales has moved 37 applications out of two outdated datacenters, although some will use a temporary hosting facility until they are replaced, according to the senior civil servant responsible.

HM Courts and Tribunals Service (HMCTS) has completed the transfer of the applications from datacenters in Park Royal, West London, and Swindon. They used around 2,500 pieces of hardware. Pete Harrison, HMCTS's program director for decommissioning and legacy risk mitigation, said: "Many of these were so old that finding replacement parts was nearly impossible... This created a fragile environment with single points of failure that could disrupt access to essential court services."

Harrison says the work to migrate the 37 applications, which started in 2020, involved scrapping some and upgrading others while shifting them to cloud platforms. The latter includes three jury management tools merged into one called Juror Digital and a complex ...