The environment department’s annual report indicates that scores of applications were successfully closed down or remediated during the 2023-24 year, enabling the imminent closure of a clutch of infrastructure facilities

As part of a major scheme to move or mitigate legacy technology, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs will shortly complete its exit from three datacentre facilities.

In its newly published annual accounts for 2023-24, Defra reveals that, during the year, “one legacy datacentre closed” as part of the department’s ongoing Legacy Applications Programme (LAP).

The facility was successfully shuttered after the programme completed the migration of 123 legacy applications to a new cloud environment, while a further 50 apps were taken out of service.

As work continues on migrating hundreds of apps to modern hosting arrangements, Defra expects to be able to cease using more ageing infrastructure early in the new year.

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“We are in the advanced stages of exiting three more [datacentres] by January 2025, so that our data increasingly sits on secure cloud environments,” the report says.

The document adds that 2023-24 was the second year of a four-year programme, backed by £78m awarded during the spending review of late 2021. The yearly report indicates that delivery is proceeding well – but has much more ground to cover.

“Legacy technology in our application estate, security risks and improving digital services are particular areas of concern that require significant investment,” it adds. “Over the past year, we made steady progress in addressing legacy technology in our application estate and launching new digital services while improving others. Nonetheless, we still have significant volumes of legacy technology in our applications and areas of security improvement and our planned investment is essential to addressing these.”

A study from the NAO published a little over a year ago found that about one in three of the nearly 2,000 applications in use across Defra and its main arm’s-length agencies were no longer supported by the supplier.