Through Technology renews three-year Digital Archiving and Records Management contract with HM Courts and Tribunals Service

Through Technology have been awarded a new three-year contract with HM Courts and Tribunals Service (HMCTS) to keep running their Strategic Digital Archiving and Records Management service - continuing a partnership that began in 2022.

We set the service up four years ago, and provide it as a managed service alongside our partners Archive360. We combine their leading software with our own expertise in secure public sector infrastructure, legacy technology management and data engineering, to keep high volumes of government data secure, accessible and under the customer's control.

Legacy systems that can't be switched off

Like much of the UK public sector, HMCTS had a pattern of keeping legacy applications running long after they should have been retired - purely because the data inside them was still needed and had to stay accessible.

Running old and new systems in parallel is expensive and risky: security patches get phased out, skills and components grow scarce, and the cost of maintaining duplicate systems mounts year on year. The challenge was to break the dependency between the data HMCTS must keep and the outdated systems it sat on - without losing access, security or compliance.

Our delivery

Since 2022, the service has supported HMCTS to retire twelve targeted legacy applications before their hosting contracts expire, archiving the data into a single governed service:

→ Over 253 million objects archived, making up more than 600Tb of data

→ In excess of £107 million forecast in operational cost savings over the first ten years - money saved for HMCTS, and ultimately the UK taxpayer.

Good archiving matters

Done well, a digital archive removes cost and risk across the estate. Done badly, the costs mount quietly. Four things a well-built archive changes:

• Retire the legacy system, keep the data. Data stays online and accessible to staff, so the ageing technology around it can be switched off - along with its cost and risk.

• Do the admin once. Retention, disposal, FOI and Subject Access Request searches, run across all your data at once rather than system by system.

• Get your data AI-ready. A governed pool of data with common metadata, on lower-cost storage, ready to present to whichever platform you choose for analytics or AI.

• Stop paying premium rates for dormant data. Move aged data off expensive high-performance hosting as it stops being actively used.

  
  

We host the service in the customer's own environment - Azure, in the case of HMCTS. That gives HMCTS the benefits of SaaS while their data stays in their own tenant. Strong data sovereignty, less legal complexity, and no vendor lock-in.

A proven solution

Accepted into service in 2023 after rigorous security testing, our service has managed high volumes of government data ever since - not a repository where data goes to expire, but a strategic resource that keeps data trusted, defensible and ready to use.

We're proud that HMCTS have chosen to back this track record for another three years - a reflection of a partnership that's worked since 2022.

A central digital archive belongs in your data strategy and your AI strategy, not filed under records management and forgotten.

Still paying to store data you can't use? Get in touch at enquiries@throughtechnology.uk.