Case Study: UK Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA) achieves secure, scalable, data-driven innovation with Amazon Web Services (AWS)

UK Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency Supports Secure, Data-Driven Innovation Using AWS

The Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA) manages more than 47 million driver records and collects about £6 billion a year in Vehicle Excise Duty, and has been digitizing services for over a decade. Rapidly rising demand for vehicle-status data (from ~600,000 to over 70 million requests per month) and plans to open datasets to third parties meant DVLA needed elastic, secure access that could scale to billions of transactions while protecting on‑premises systems and sensitive personal data.

DVLA built an API-first, serverless solution on AWS using Amazon API Gateway and AWS Lambda, standing up a prototype in days and moving to managed, pay-per-use services that eliminate most infrastructure overhead. The result is massive, elastic scalability with built-in throttling and security controls to protect fixed-capacity backend systems and PII, faster innovation cycles for developers, lower costs, and secure programmatic access for police, local authorities, and third-party innovators.

UK Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency

Matt Lewis

Chief Architect