Case Study: GOV.UK achieves scalable, cost-saving digital government services with MongoDB

Reinventing Data Management for Government Websites

MongoDB partnered with the UK government’s GOV.UK initiative to tackle the challenge of consolidating many separate agency websites into a single, citizen-facing service after high-profile failures like HealthCare.gov exposed the risks of large, waterfall-driven IT projects and rigid relational databases. GOV.UK needed a scalable, user-focused platform that could handle diverse content types, heavy traffic, and faster iterative development.

The team replaced an initial MySQL approach with MongoDB’s document model and a cloud-hosted content API, enabling flexible data integration, continuous testing, and rapid feature delivery. The result was a mobile-friendly, open-source platform that scaled reliably, improved the user experience, and is credited with saving British taxpayers at least $20 million a year while serving as a model for other large-scale, data-driven government services.

GOV.UK

Mike Bracken

Executive Director of Digital