Case Study: Somerset County Council achieves improved collaboration, agility, and cost savings with Microsoft Azure

Somerset County Council improve collaboration and operations

Somerset County Council, one of the world’s oldest local governments serving 550,000 residents, faced the loss of a third of its revenue and rising IT costs from an aging, inflexible datacentre. Its critical ROAM rights‑of‑way app suffered performance issues and limited scalability, so the council needed to cut costs, improve collaboration and modernize technology without disrupting citizen services.

Working with Microsoft Services and Cloud Navigator, Somerset migrated most systems to Azure and adopted Office 365, VSTS and DevOps practices (infrastructure as code). ROAM was re‑architected—web in Azure App Service, GeoServer in Docker and PostgreSQL on Azure—delivering faster, more reliable service, automated provisioning, mobile collaboration, major cost and power‑bill savings (including a £65,000 datacentre saving), a shortened implementation timeline (from 3–4 years to 18 months) and new opportunities for citizen engagement and services.

Somerset County Council

Andy Grigg

Enterprise Architect