National Express is the UK's largest coach operator, serving more than 900 destinations across the UK and internationally. With critical digital platforms supporting ticketing, operations and revenue-generating services, the organisation needed to modernise its legacy infrastructure to improve agility, reduce costs and strengthen resilience. By partnering with Bytes and AWS, National Express migrated from an on-premises environment to a scalable cloud platform, enabling faster response to business change, improved operational efficiency and a secure foundation for future innovation and growth.National Express is the UK's largest coach operator, serving more than 900 destinations across the UK and internationally. With critical digital platforms supporting ticketing, operations and revenue-generating services, the organisation needed to modernise its legacy infrastructure to improve agility, reduce costs and strengthen resilience. By partnering with Bytes and AWS, National Express migrated from an on-premises environment to a scalable cloud platform, enabling faster response to business change, improved operational efficiency and a secure foundation for future innovation and growth.

National Express was operating a large on-premises virtualised infrastructure comprising approximately 700 VMware-hosted servers. While the environment supported daily operations, it presented several challenges:

• Limited agility to support evolving business requirements
• A lack of foundation for future IT modernisation
• Reliability concerns affecting business-critical services
• Restrictive legacy contracts with limited cost efficiency
• The need to migrate with minimal disruption to customers and operations

The organisation wanted to modernise its infrastructure, improve agility, enhance operational efficiency and gain greater control over costs by moving to Amazon Web Services (AWS).

National Express selected Bytes to deliver an ambitious cloud transformation programme, migrating its infrastructure from an on-premises environment to AWS. Bytes provided expertise across planning, architecture, migration, managed services and security, helping to design and execute a structured migration strategy. 

To minimise risk and disruption, the migration was executed in more than 25 carefully planned waves aligned to business units and revenue-generating services. AWS Migration Services tooling was used to reduce downtime, maintain database integrity and ensure workloads were securely transferred to AWS. 

Key project deliverables included:

• Development of a secure, scalable AWS landing zone
• Migration of more than 700 servers to AWS
• Successful migration of business-critical applications
• Introduction of Bytes Managed Services for ongoing operational support
• Creation of a cloud platform to support future modernisation initiatives

Following migration, National Express transitioned to a fully managed AWS platform service delivered by Bytes, providing end-to-end management, optimisation and support.

Security and Operational Management

As part of the managed service, Bytes delivers backup and recovery management, cloud infrastructure operations and security services designed to maintain resilience and business continuity. Security capabilities include:

• Cloud-native security posture management
• Runtime protection for cloud workloads
• Identity protection across Active Directory and Entra ID
• AI-driven security monitoring and threat detection
• Continuous monitoring, tuning and response managed by Bytes

The migration programme was completed in under nine months and successfully moved more than 700 servers to AWS across 25 separate migration waves.
As a result, National Express achieved:

• Approximately £3 million in savings over a 24-month period
• Around £500,000 in annual savings through modernising a legacy application delivery platform
• Approximately 75% faster provisioning of new compute resources
• Greater agility to respond to changing business needs
• Improved operational efficiency and security
• A scalable cloud platform to support future innovation and growth
•  

Why Bytes?

As an AWS Premier Tier Services Partner, Bytes supports organisations throughout the cloud lifecycle, from strategy and design through to migration, optimisation, security, governance and managed services. National Express selected Bytes for its proven experience delivering complex AWS transformation projects and ability to provide end-to-end support.