Case Study

Public Sector

Company: London Borough of Tower Hamlets
Engagement: Data platform modernisation and migration programme

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Overview

London Borough of Tower Hamlets (LBTH) embarked on a programme to modernise and scale its Azure-based data platform to support increasing analytics demand, stronger governance, and improved operational resilience across the council.

While the long-term vision was to create a centralised data platform for the entire organisation, the initial engagement focused on transforming financial reporting and migrating Adult Social Care (Mosaic) analytics and reporting workloads from SAP onto the new Azure data platform.

The council’s existing platform operated within a single Azure subscription and had begun to show limitations as data volumes and Power BI adoption grew across departments. GRADIS was engaged to design a new enterprise-grade architecture, migrate the existing environment, and implement modern operational and governance controls to support both immediate financial reporting needs and future council-wide analytics.

Challenge

  • A single-subscription architecture limiting scalability and performance
  • No clear separation between development, testing, production, and analytics environments
  • Increasing security and governance risks as platform usage expanded
  • Manual and inconsistent deployment processes
  • Growing demand from Power BI placing strain on backend infrastructure
  • Heavy reliance on manual data exports from financial and operational systems
  • Limited monitoring and operational visibility across the platform

These challenges made it difficult to deliver real-time financial insights, scale analytics services, and support evolving business requirements.

LBTH’s original data platform faced several constraints:

Solution

GRADIS designed and delivered a modern multi-subscription Azure data platform aligned with cloud best practices and public sector governance standards.

The solution included:

  • A structured five-subscription model separating development, QA, production, analytics, and core services
  • Improved security, compliance, and access control through environment isolation
  • A scalable platform capable of supporting increasing data volumes and users
  • Automated CI/CD processes using Azure DevOps to manage deployments and platform configuration
  • A controlled migration of data, pipelines, and reporting workloads from the legacy platform and SAP environment to Azure
  • Integration of core financial systems and Mosaic data into the centralised platform
  • Enhanced connectivity for Power BI and analytics services across departments

Alongside the platform transformation, GRADIS implemented monitoring, operational runbooks, and onboarding processes to support long-term reliability and adoption across the council.

Results

The modernisation programme delivered significant organisational impact:

  • A scalable, enterprise-grade data platform supporting analytics teams across the council
  • Real-time financial and operational reporting, replacing batch-based manual processes
  • A single pane of glass for analytics, providing consistent and trusted insights across departments and projects
  • Significant reduction in manual exports and spreadsheet-driven reporting
  • Successful migration of Mosaic reporting from SAP to Azure, improving performance and accessibility
  • Onboarding of multiple analytics teams onto a centralised, governed platform
  • Improved platform stability, performance, and operational visibility
  • Stronger security and governance aligned with public sector requirements

A key outcome of the programme was the delivery of real-time financial and operational integrations built on the new data platform. These innovations were recognised externally, with LBTH’s Finance Directorate winning a public sector award for excellence in data integration and real-time reporting.

Project Summary

Client

London Borough of Tower Hamlets

Platform

Microsoft Azure Data Platform

Scope

  • Modernisation
  • Scalable architecture
  • Data governance
  • Reporting uplift
  • Future-ready platform

Key outcomes

  • Modern, cloud-native data stack
  • Enhanced data governance
  • Scalable, high-performance architecture
  • Trusted, business-ready reporting

Technologies

  • Azure Databricks
  • Azure Synapse
  • Azure Data Factory
  • Azure SQL
  • Power BI
  • SAP