Our work with the British Business Bank has delivered faster and safer infrastructure deployments
The British Business Bank asked us to strengthen their internal capabilities to speed up delivery, reduce risk and build lasting operational resilience
We’ve been working with the British Business Bank on its Guarantees Portal and Cloud Platform, supporting the delivery of finance schemes to smaller businesses.
The British Business Bank is the UK’s economic development bank for smaller businesses across the UK. It helps them access the finance they need to start up and grow. Owned by the Department for Business and Trade, it’s operationally independent and delivers a range of products through over 200 delivery partners.
The Challenge
The British Business Bank needs to be confident that its infrastructure is robust, secure, and, crucially, recoverable in a Business Continuity/Disaster Recovery scenario.
The Bank was reliant on infrastructure that had grown organically over time. Although these systems were delivering, it wanted to make improvements to move on from manual setups, inconsistent environments and legacy platforms that could slow down delivery, increase risk and make disaster recovery complex and expensive.
Result
- Cloud Mean Time to Recovery (MTTR) decreased from multiple days to hours
- massively reduced administrative overhead
- repeatable and tested runbooks
- 3–5 day supplier bottleneck on every deployment removed
- application releases now happen daily with robust deployment pipelines
- Modernised and improved Terraform code across the Azure platform
- reduced technical debt and deployment headaches
- allows quicker iterations and faster greenfield project development
Our work with the British Business Bank has delivered faster and safer infrastructure deployments, with automated pipelines catching errors early and building team confidence. By establishing consistent environments, we have significantly lowered production risk and transformed disaster recovery into a simple, testable process. Creating a shared, reusable platform has also fostered more cross-team collaboration and broken down traditional operational silos.
Greater visibility and control means the Bank now has clearer insights into cloud costs to inform future investment decisions. They have strengthened their internal capabilities by hiring an embedded infrastructure team, which aligns with our own delivery model and ensures the right foundations are in place for modernisation.
Our approach
We embedded our specialists which meant infrastructure, security and delivery decisions could be made collaboratively and early in the product lifecycle, rather than bolted on later.
We combined proven DevOps practices with security-first cloud architecture and reusable, open-source code. Using our design and technical expertise, along with an existing open-source IaC module, we were able to iterate quickly, remediate issues, and work with the Bank to align their codebase and identify areas of configuration drift.
We developed standardised release pipelines that incorporate code quality assurance, pre-emptive security scanning, and supply chain security. By refining existing IaC and implementing robust, scalable patterns, the time-to-live for new workload deployments improved massively.
Introducing consistent, predictable configurations across diverse existing workloads improved architectural clarity and provided a clearer understanding of the infrastructure deployed across the entire Azure estate.
Improvements made included:
- Standardised, automated infrastructure
- improved readability, refactored and tidied up critical IaC codebases to enable faster delivery
- consistent release pipelines across environments to reduce technical overhead
- reduced configuration drift between non-production and production environments
- Improved resilience and disaster recovery
- improved fault tolerance and disaster recovery by focusing on configuring cross-region failover and geo-redundancy
- remediated misconfigurations and improved BCDR readiness
- Security-first cloud architecture
- designed infrastructure using Azure Well-Architectured Framework and security best practice recommendations from Defender for Cloud
- added IaC code scanning and supply chain security to infrastructure release pipelines, to help shift-left security in DevOps and catch potential misconfigurations early before they reach production
- increased observability and monitoring throughout the cloud estate with a dedicated Azure Monitor landing zone to get ahead of issues and respond proactively, rather than the traditional break-fix approach
Together, we delivered an infrastructure that accelerates development, while building lasting operational resilience.