Aker supports safety and security of the UK by transforming Home Office data infrastructure

The Client

The Home Office is one of the UK’s largest and most complex government departments, responsible for protecting the public, securing borders, and upholding national security. It operates critical services that rely on timely, accurate, and secure data — from tracking freight and passenger movements to identifying organised crime and ensuring lawful immigration.

To strengthen these capabilities, the Data Services & Analytics (DSA) unit leads the Home Office’s mission to become the UK Government’s leading provider of data insight services. DSA enables the collection, sharing, and analysis of vital information across the department and with partner agencies, helping decision-makers act quickly and confidently.

Recognising that legacy data systems were limiting speed, scalability, and interoperability, DSA launched a transformation to build a modern, enterprise-scale data platform. The goal was to acquire and share data from hundreds of government and commercial sources at pace, underpinning the Home Office’s transition to a secure, real-time data ecosystem.

The Challenge​

The department’s existing infrastructure could no longer keep up with the scale, variety, and complexity of modern data. Critical decisions relied on fragmented systems that were slow to update, difficult to integrate, and costly to manage.

The challenge was intensified by:

• Rapid growth in data volumes and sources.
• Increasing adoption of AI and automation demanding cleaner, more accessible data.
• Decentralised operating models introducing new technical and governance complexity.
• Rising privacy and compliance expectations across jurisdictions.
• Pressure to deliver services faster and more efficiently under constrained budgets.
  

To address these issues, the Home Office needed a secure, cloud-based data acquisition and sharing platform capable of real-time and batch-based processing — operating 24/7, at OFFICIAL-SENSITIVE security level, and compliant with all UK data protection and evidential standards.

The Solution​

Aker Systems designed, built, and operated the DSA Core Data Ingestion Platforms.

Delivered as cloud-native managed services on AWS, these platforms form the backbone of the Home Office’s data environment — enabling the secure, standardised, and real-time movement of data across Border Force, Immigration, Police, and other operational units.

The new platform:

• Modernised the data foundation, replacing fragmented legacy systems with a single, scalable environment.
• Automated data onboarding and validation, reducing manual effort and improving compliance.
• Enhanced data security through a zero-trust design — encrypting data in transit and at rest, with fine-grained access controls.
• Enabled interoperability, supporting open data standards and integration across hundreds of government and commercial partners.
• Improved resilience and reliability, using continuous monitoring and service management aligned with Home Office operations.
  

Since its launch, the platform has evolved to support new use cases such as passenger and freight carrier data gateways, enterprise system integrations, and commercial data acquisition — becoming a critical enabler of the UK’s national safety and border-security ecosystem.

The Technology 

The Home Office Core Data Ingestion Platforms were designed and operated by Aker Systems to deliver a secure, scalable, and future-ready foundation for real-time data sharing and analytics across government.

Key Technology Foundations:

• Cloud-Native and Scalable: Built on AWS and Kubernetes for elasticity, resilience, and high performance at national scale.
• Stream-First Architecture: Real-time data processing backbone supporting operational and analytical workloads simultaneously.
• Secure-by-Design (Zero Trust): Encryption in transit and at rest, micro-segmentation, strict role-based access, and continuous compliance monitoring.
• Open and Interoperable: Standards-based APIs and data formats enable integration with 500+ government and commercial data providers.
• Standardised Data Model: Conforms data in real-time the POLE (Party, Object, Location, Event) schema to improve consistency, matching, and reuse across systems.
• Automated Governance and Observability: Continuous monitoring, automated assurance workflows, and SRE-driven service management for reliability and transparency.
• High Availability and Fault Tolerance: Stateless microservices and distributed design ensuring uninterrupted 24/7 operations and zero data loss.
• Modular and Extensible: Flexible architecture allowing rapid onboarding of new data sources and deployment of new analytical and AI-driven services.

A secure, cloud-native, data infrastructure enabling the Home Office to acquire, standardise, and share critical data at national scale — with speed, certainty, and operational resilience.

The Value

“The service has proven itself to be a “business accelerator”, providing a step-change increase in the speed at which data sources can be acquired at a significantly reduced cost” 

~ Andy Gregory, Home Office

Aker’s data platforms have delivered transformational results for the Home Office, enabling faster, more trusted, and more cost-effective access to critical information.

Key Benefits

• Accelerated onboarding: Reduced time to integrate new data sources from 7 months to 2 months.
• Real-time enablement: Systems that once updated daily and weekly now refresh within minutes/seconds.
• Expanded access: Hundreds of data sources that the Home Office has been unable to acquire previously.
• Enterprise efficiency: Consolidation of multiple legacy data gateways into a single, scalable platform.
• Lower costs: 50–70% reduction in data source onboarding and integration costs.

Through this partnership, Aker Systems has enabled the Home Office to move from legacy data silos to a unified, data infrastructure — delivering speed, trust, and operational certainty in service of national security and public protection.