Executive Summary
Our client, a national Critical Infrastructure Provider, delivers essential services for millions of UK citizens. Operating under regulatory oversight, they manage high-value assets and critical digital systems across the UK. Their strategic aim was to modernise cyber defences, build intelligence-led threat monitoring, and align with NCSC’s Cloud Security Principles, all while transitioning legacy operations into modern, agile environments hosted on public cloud platforms.
This engagement fell under the a large central government transformation programme.
The Challenge
The client faced a rising volume of complex and persistent threats, including those from hostile nation-state actors targeting infrastructure and citizen data. Their traditional perimeter-based defences were insufficient for the hybrid estate spanning data centres and public cloud.
Past attempts to introduce threat intelligence platforms lacked integration with SOC, SIEM, and DevSecOps pipelines, resulting in siloed insights and poor response coordination.
With no consolidated or automated mechanism to detect, analyse, or act on threats across the hybrid environment, the risk posture was unacceptable especially for services handling OFFICIAL-SENSITIVE to SECRET data.
Solution
🔧 A&A Digital Tech’s Approach
We deployed our SC/DV-cleared Architects and DevSecOps specialists to undertake a secure discovery.
Key steps included:
🔍 Diagnostics and Workshops: We held risk triage sessions, assessed threat surfaces (NCSC-aligned), and evaluated cloud-native controls vs existing tooling.
📊 Framework: We used NCSC CAF and NIST CSF to conduct risk assessment and audit to prioritise detection, response, and containment workflows.
⏱️ Timeline: Delivered Alpha-to-Beta in 12 weeks; embedded within agile squads and security architecture forums.
🔨 Solutions Design
🧠 Threat Intelligence Platform (TIP): Integrated MISP with AWS-native services and StreamAlert for real-time threat ingestion and automated alerting.
🔐 Zero-Trust Security Architecture: Role-based isolation, CI/CD security checks (SAST, DAST, SCA), and IAM policies enforcing least privilege.
🛡️ Protective Monitoring: Serverless capability using GuardDuty, Kinesis, Lambda, and Slack/PagerDuty for alerting and triage.
🚨 Automated Threat Response: Lambda-driven lockdowns triggered by suspicious activity; access revoked, audit logs initiated.
🤝 Secure Collaboration: DevSecOps pipelines enforced signed artefacts, secure secrets management (AWS KMS/Secrets Manager), and scanning via Anchore.
🎯 Training & Handover: Delivered Cyber Range simulations and workshops with reusable SOC playbooks.
Outcome
⏱️ Mean Time to Detect (MTTD): Reduced from 22 hours to under 10 minutes.
⚡ Mean Time to Respond (MTTR): Improved from days to under 30 minutes.
📈 Threat Coverage: >92% of NCSC high-risk use cases monitored.
✅ NCSC/GCHQ Sign-Off: One of the first formally approved cloud-hosted threat response automations in UK Government.
💷 Cost Savings: Estimated in millions of GBP annually via breach reduction, SOC efficiency, and decommissioned legacy tooling.
Key Learnings and Takeaways
🧩 Integrate threat intelligence and monitoring natively into CI/CD pipelines—don’t bolt them on.
📦 Serverless architectures offer agility and scale but require rigorous IAM and logging hygiene.
🤝 Early engagement with NCSC and risk owners accelerates buy-in and approval for sensitive workloads.
👥 Human-in-the-loop remains essential SOC teams were embedded via early simulations and agile ceremonies.
This model is now repeatable across other departments handling sensitive citizen data and operating in hybrid-cloud environments.
