Taking provisioning time from hours to 30 minutes

Challenge

Lloyds Banking Group needed to evolve its Google Cloud landing zone to accommodate a growing volume of workloads, but the existing Phase 1 implementation had left critical capabilities unfinished. The incomplete foundation was limiting the group's ability to scale confidently, and the complexity of the programme demanded careful multi-partner coordination to move forward without disrupting what was already in place. Without a reliable, repeatable mechanism for provisioning and compliance, the risk of human error and configuration inconsistency across environments remained unacceptably high for an organisation operating under the scrutiny of financial services regulation.

Solution

We joined the programme at Phase 2, taking responsibility for designing and building the missing capabilities and engineering them into repeatable Infrastructure-as-Code from the ground up. Key patterns delivered included SQL Server Always-on Availability Groups to support highly available workloads, and an automated image factory capable of running compliance scans across five image families covering both Windows and RedHat environments. Every element was built to be consistent, auditable, and scalable, removing the dependency on manual processes that had previously introduced risk and delay into the provisioning pipeline.

Outcomes

The impact on operational tempo was immediate and significant. VM provisioning time dropped from several hours to just 30 minutes, giving engineering teams the speed and reliability they needed to support business demand. Automated build and compliance testing across all five image families eliminated human configuration errors and brought a level of consistency to the environment that manual processes could never reliably deliver. With a robust, code-driven foundation now in place, Lloyds Banking Group has the infrastructure confidence to scale its Google Cloud estate on its own terms.