Case Study: Somerset County Council achieves improved collaboration, productivity, and cost savings with Microsoft Corporation Azure and Office 365

Somerset County Council improve collaboration and operations

Somerset County Council, one of the world’s oldest local governments, needed to keep serving 550,000 residents despite sharp budget cuts, rising IT costs, and an aging on-premises data center that couldn’t scale reliably. Its collaboration-heavy ROAM application, used by employees and citizens to report and manage issues across 9,000 paths, was especially vulnerable to slowdowns and freezes. The council worked with Microsoft Corporation, using Azure and Office 365, to modernize its technology and improve collaboration and operations.

Microsoft Corporation helped Somerset County Council move most infrastructure to Azure, build a DevOps environment in just four days, and redesign ROAM with App Service, Docker, and Azure Database for PostgreSQL. The result was faster deployments, no scheduled downtime for updates, improved responsiveness, and new opportunities for citizen engagement; Office 365 also boosted mobile working and interdepartmental collaboration. The council reported significant cost savings, including the ability to shut down unused services automatically and eventually eliminate a yearly £65,000 power bill, while cutting the project timeline roughly in half.

Somerset County Council

Andy Grigg

Enterprise Architect