Case Study: Somerset County Council achieves greater efficiency, faster releases, and £65,000 annual savings with Microsoft Azure

County government boosts innovation and savings with cloud and open source

Somerset County Council, which serves about 550,000 residents across a largely rural area, faced rising IT costs, aging datacenter hardware and frequent outages that left key services—like its ROAM rights‑of‑way app—slow or unusable (the notorious “pink screen”). Budget cuts and an expiring outsourcing contract forced the council to rethink its infrastructure and development processes to improve scalability, availability, and citizen services.

Working with Microsoft, Somerset moved to a hybrid Azure architecture and built a DevOps pipeline in four days using Visual Studio Team Services, infrastructure as code, Azure App Service, containers for GeoServer, and the managed Azure Database for PostgreSQL. The change delivered automated instant provisioning, faster and safer releases, higher availability, and scalability (eliminating the ROAM performance issues), while cutting support overhead and saving more than £65,000 a year in datacenter power — enabling new service and engagement opportunities.

Somerset County Council

Andy Grigg

Enterprise Architect