The UK and Irish branch of Centrica, the partent company of British Gas, is shedding its physical infrastructure, closing its data centers and migrating its applications onto Microsoft’s cloud - and the process is well underway, according to Computer World UK.

The migration project is expected to be completed before the end of the year, or within the first months of 2018 at the latest.

Keeping up with the Joneses

Centrica’s shift from on-premises servers and into the cloud is in line with the current data processing and storage trends - public infrastructure is seen as more cost-effective, and increasingly accepted as a secure way of handling one’s IT. 

British Gas has led the way in deployment of so-called smart meters in households across the UK, having installed them for four million out of 27m British customers.

Although 90 percent of Centrica’s workloads will live in Microsoft’s cloud, customer data will be managed through a platform from SAP. The German software giant has made major investments into its analytics and Big Data management business, following the launch of SAP Leonardo service - an umbrella brand for all of its IoT services and products.