Lloyds Banking Group is to close its data center in Copley, West Yorkshire.

Earlier this year the UK banking firm announced a £60 million ($67m) modernization plan for its Halifax Bank unit's HQ in Halifax town, which would include the closure of its nearby data center and office complex in Copley.

While the transfer of office staff is due to begin next year with an aim to complete the Halifax renovation project by 2024, this week it outlined that the company plans to exit the data center at a later date.

A Lloyds spokesperson told the Halifax Courier this week: “Regarding Copley Data Centre - the process will take some time and we expect the building to close in 2025, with the building remaining in use until closure.”

Lloyds has long been on a journey of migrating away from on-premises and into the cloud. In 2017 Lloyds signed a 10-year cloud outsourcing deal with IBM worth £1.3 billion.

The agreement saw around 1,500 Lloyds staff and contractors to be shipped over to Big Blue. While never officially confirmed, it was reported that the bank would also be selling a number of its data centers to the technology company and paying IBM for their operation. Around the time of the deal, Lloyds reportedly operated facilities in Copley, Pudsey, Peterborough, and Corby.

In 2020 Lloyds signed cloud deals with both Azure and Google Cloud, and claims its tech stack “includes GCP, Azure, OpenShift, and Kubernetes.”

Last year Lloyds Executive Director and CFO William Chalmers told Diginomica: “We're investing in the foundations of transformation by further proving and leveraging our public cloud capabilities. This is a precursor to simplifying our legacy estate. While I must stress we're currently at an early stage, significant opportunities exist. Around 60 percent of our technology estate is currently targeted for migration over the longer term, with a significant proportion of this to be achieved over the next three years.”