Accelerating National Highways’ incident response with Azure Cloud

National Highways (NH) is a UK government organisation with over 5,000 employees responsible for managing England’s Strategic Road Network (SRN) of 4,500 miles of motorways and major A roads. NH faced a critical challenge. Its legacy system for incident reporting and communication was creaking under the strain of the enormous volume of incidents it was receiving, impacting its ability to respond rapidly to incidents and keep its roads safe.

NH’s existing Visual Basic 6 client application was creating a significant bottleneck. The legacy system was time-consuming to use, requiring free-text data entry. It lacked input guidance, dropdowns and other data navigation elements. It also had limited data validation and poor reporting capabilities. As a result, incident response times were slow, making it challenging to share critical information with key stakeholders, including the media and road users. In a serious incident, every minute is crucial, and NH needed a modern, intuitive application to support its vital work. 

National Highways envisioned a dynamic, user-friendly solution that would streamline incident logging, reporting and closure. Any proposed system must also integrate with NH’s existing infrastructure and provide enhanced security and reliability. The ultimate goal would be to enable faster incident response, improve communication with stakeholders and enhance road safety for millions of users. 

We collaborated with NH to develop a cutting-edge Azure cloud-native solution with Azure PaaS, App Service, Azure SQL Server, .NET, and DevOps at its heart. We replaced the legacy system with a modern, cloud-based application with a user-friendly interface, pre-populated fields, dropdown options, data validation and a dedicated NILO database. Additionally, we implemented Terraform (infrastructure as code), Microsoft Defender for enhanced security and Azure DevOps for streamlined updates and refinements.

The Azure-based solution has transformed NH’s operations, with incident reporting now 150% faster and incident closure efficiency increased by 82%. Thanks to the new, user-friendly interface, incident creation is also 50% faster. This improved efficiency means rapid dissemination of information to the media and road users, enabling them to make informed decisions and take steps to avoid potential hazards, which translates to safer roads, reduced congestion and quicker journey times for millions of road users. By June 2023, the new app had already been used to log over 5,000 incidents by NH Incident Liaison Officers (NILOs), who monitor and respond to incidents 24/7, 365 days a year across 4,500+ miles of main roads and motorways. 

In addition, the new system has strengthened security measures, protecting critical national infrastructure. The cloud-native architecture ensures greater resilience, cost control and eases future refinements. The award-winning project’s success has significantly advanced NH’s Digital Roads 2025 strategy and reduced its carbon footprint by optimising server usage.

Outcomes

• Replaced the legacy VB6 system with an Azure PaaS cloud-native solution 
• Utilised Terraform (infrastructure as code) and Microsoft Defender for security 
• Implemented Azure DevOps for streamlined updates and refinements 
• Developed a user-friendly interface with pre-populated fields, dropdown options, and data validation 
• Integrated with the existing legacy database for reporting purposes 
• Reduced time to market by seven weeks through the use of a .NET and DevOps-based development accelerator