Leonardo, a defense contractor known for its helicopters and advanced electronics, has deployed the cloud-based Azure platform across its UK business.
Leonardo’s UK-based scientists and engineers will now have secure access to a remotely-accessible ‘digital backbone’ that will speed up product research, cut development costs and enable closer collaboration with customers and other partners. In the future, Leonardo will also be able to use the digital backbone to exploit the huge amount of data it collects in the form of new products and services.
Leonardo said it will invest around £100M this year in the UK in its ongoing enablers strategy, including the Future Factory transformation project. Last year the company rolled out digital electronics factories across the country, with a ‘common data environment’ putting big data at the fingertips of engineers.
Gareth Hetheridge, Director Digital and IT, Leonardo UK, said: “With the introduction of the Leonardo digital backbone, employees, partners and customers can now securely access relevant data and applications anytime, anywhere. This will be vital as industry moves to a model of defence contracting where companies and customers work more closely together than ever before, despite being physically located around the country and internationally. Our close partnership with Microsoft UK and Accenture has allowed us to adopt this disruptive technology at pace and we’re very proud to be flying the flag for bringing the benefits of the cloud to the UK defence industry.”
Aaron Neil, Director Defence & Secure Markets, Microsoft UK, said: “Over the last year we have worked with Leonardo UK to better understand its digital transformation aspirations and priorities. We are delighted to support Leonardo's migration to Azure, enabling highly secure access to the cloud; this announcement is testament to our close partnership and an exciting milestone in delivering advanced technology to accelerate capability delivery for UK Defence.”
