Executive Summary
A UK-based public sector organisation was undergoing a large-scale digital transformation to modernise its mission-critical systems and reduce reliance on legacy infrastructure. As part of its Strategic Systems Programme, the client sought to replace traditional waterfall-based processes with agile, automated solutions to enable faster, safer and more frequent delivery of software. Operating across highly secure environments including systems marked OFFICIAL-SENSITIVE the organisation’s ambitions included uplift of DevOps maturity, automation of infrastructure, and optimisation of software delivery and monitoring.
A&A Digital Tech was engaged as a strategic delivery partner, leveraging its experience in high-assurance environments to deliver full-spectrum DevOps capability. Our task involved transforming the build, test and release processes to reduce manual overhead, strengthen platform resilience, and promote a culture of “everything-as-code.” The environment involved close collaboration with internal civil servants, other vendors, and oversight bodies to ensure alignment with both technical standards and public sector governance.
The Challenge
The programme faced several barriers that impeded the client’s digital maturity goals:
🛠️ Manual Delivery Processes: Legacy build and release processes were slow and heavily manual, limiting release frequency and increasing operational risk.
🔐 Security Constraints: Strict compliance and audit controls—particularly for OFFICIAL-SENSITIVE and SECRET data—restricted the adoption of modern DevOps tooling.
⛓️ Dependency Bottlenecks: Interdependent workstreams and poor coordination across teams and suppliers caused significant delays in release management.
🚫 Lack of Automation: Development teams lacked integrated pipelines, observability tools, and rollback mechanisms—resulting in reactive operations.
🤝 Fragmented Ownership: Dispersed accountability across government departments and suppliers led to communication friction and inefficient handoffs.
Previous transformation attempts failed to address these challenges cohesively. A&A Digital Tech was brought in to deliver a secure, scalable CI/CD framework and embedded DevOps automation to uplift delivery velocity while retaining operational and compliance integrity.
Previous transformation attempts had struggled to address these compounded challenges in a unified and secure manner. A&A Digital Tech was tasked with delivering a scalable CI/CD framework, embedded automation, and security-first DevOps to uplift delivery velocity while maintaining operational control and compliance integrity.
Our Solution
A&A Digital Tech deployed a cross-functional team with deep expertise in cloud-native, secure-by-design DevOps architecture.
🧭 Strategic Planning & Engagement: Held discovery workshops with key stakeholders to define CI/CD goals, constraints, and delivery risks. Co-developed a 90-day planning cadence, aligning sprint activities to programme milestones.
🔄 CI/CD Framework Design: Designed secure, automated CI/CD pipelines using GitLab, Jenkins, and AWS-native tools (CodePipeline, CodeBuild). Used AWS CDK (TypeScript) for Infrastructure-as-Code, enabling auditable and repeatable deployments.
🔐 Security & Observability Automation: Embedded zero-trust principles with IAM controls, admin approval workflows, and multi-party verification. Implemented monitoring via Lambda, CloudWatch, and StreamAlert—linked with Slack and PagerDuty for real-time alerting.
🛡️ Environment Resilience: Adopted blue-green deployments and immutable infrastructure to ensure reliable, low-risk releases. Built auto-remediation Lambdas to isolate risks and protect service continuity.
🎓 Knowledge Sharing & Upskilling: Embedded engineers in client teams for hands-on pairing and agile ceremonies. Provided documentation via Confluence and delivered complimentary DevOps apprenticeships to civil servants.
This holistic approach enabled secure automation aligned to high-assurance programme governance.
A&A Digital Tech’s solution achieved full integration with programme governance, agile workflows and compliance requirements. We facilitated real-time visibility of all releases, logs and test results, enabling client teams to build confidence in automation and shift from reactive operations to proactive engineering.
Outcomes
🚀 Deployment Velocity: 3x increase in weekly releases through secure CI/CD automation.
🔐 Enhanced Security: OFFICIAL-SENSITIVE controls implemented and validated against NCSC guidance.
💸 Operational Savings: ~40% reduction in manual deployment effort and associated delivery costs.
🎓 Upskilled Civil Servants: On-the-job training and mentoring led to sustained internal DevOps capability.
🔄 Resilient Systems: Auto-remediation and lockdown mechanisms enabled rapid incident response.
📈 Improved Maturity: Incident turnaround reduced from days to minutes via observability enhancements.
Key Learnings & Takeaways
🔐 Secure-by-default DevOps is viable even in high-assurance, regulated environments.
🤝 Collaboration across suppliers and civil servants is critical to successful CI/CD transformation.
📅 Planning cadence and early dependency alignment reduce rework and delays.
🧠 DevOps-as-a-practice, not a role, creates enduring delivery capabilities.
♻️ Reusable IaC and CI/CD modules accelerate adoption across the public sector.
