The Department for Environment Food & Rural Affairs (Defra) is the UK Government department responsible for safeguarding our country’s natural environment. Defra face demands on its resources alongside facing uncertainty of a vastly changed operational landscape post-Brexit.

Defra required ‘Analysis Ready Data’ (ARD) from simple visualisations to complex machine learning algorithms and identified they would benefit from building a facility to automatically generate ARD. With over 30 years’ experience developing software and networks for space, industry and government, CGI was engaged to offer Defra an intelligent, cost-effective solution to harness the crucial Sentinel data and process, produce and disseminate ARD.

CGI identified the need to use open architecture and cloud-based systems and recommended a public cloud provider (MS Azure) and integrated an existing UK-based solution. This led to the successful development and deployment of the alpha product within 3 months.