Derbyshire County Council in the UK is planning a data center migration, moving files from its "aging" HQ to Microsoft's Azure cloud platform.

The migration will include moving the council's confidential social services files. The project has been in the works since April 2024, according to a report from DerbyshireLive.

The project, when first announced in 2024 under a Conservative administration in the county, was expected to cost around £6.2 million ($8.39m), but has since been reduced to £3.95m ($5.35m), with the council now part of the Reform party.

Reform is a right-wing to far-right political party in the UK, founded in 2018. It is led by Nigel Farage, former leader of the UKIP party, and campaigns for lower taxes, reducing immigration, and opposing net-zero emissions policies, as well as reducing public spending.

Currently, Derbyshire's data is stored in its data center within the County Hall in Matlock, but the facility has "poor suitability" for the task, and a council report has called for a "timely decant." Previously, the council had a secondary data center at the Shand House offices in Darley Dale, but the facility was closed in October 2025, and with it, the council lost its backup facility.

The report said of the current IT footprint: “With Shand House decommissioned, all remaining on-premises digital operations are concentrated in a single, aging data center at County Hall, increasing operational risk.

“Current disaster recovery capabilities are untested and inadequate; physical risks include water ingress, outdated electrical backup generators, abandoned cabling, and network bearer locations."

An estimated £2-3 million ($2.71-4.06m) would be needed to build a new data center at the site, a necessity for the council to remain "on-premises." Instead, the council will migrate to a "cloud data center," with costs estimated at £400,000-£576.000 ($541,300-$780,000) per year.

The council will migrate to Microsoft Azure cloud, hosted in a London data center. The move is also paving the way to merge data with other councils through a local government reorganization from April 2028.

Microsoft operates its UK South region in data centers located in and around London, with three availability zones. The region was launched in 2016, with additional availability zones being added in 2019. The company also operates UK West, which is based near Wales.

Earlier this month, it was reported that the region was experiencing significant capacity constraints, with customers alleging they were unable to complete migration efforts to the region or scale compute effectively.