The move will be part of a broader digitisation of HMRC's IT services and the systems that support them, HMRC infrastructure digital service manager Kalbir Sohi said in a blog.
"It is HMRC's ambition to change the way we build and manage infrastructure across the whole of our IT estate, including the largest systems in HMRC – the ones we use for calculating how much tax people owe," Sohi said.
"Our goal is to move large amounts of the infrastructure we run in HMRC onto cloud infrastructure and to do so in a way that is repeatable, efficient and automated," he said. "As we move into beta we will be working with the teams that build and maintain some of our core tax systems to identify how we can move those systems onto secure cloud-based technology using our emerging toolset."
Sohi said that HMRC has been developing automated infrastructure to support a common approach to digitisation across the organisation and that it will use open source software to support new digital tax services.
"Having access to fast, repeatable, efficient infrastructure will change the way that teams approach building and running the HMRC services that do not fit the platform as a service model," Sohi said.
"We are committed to both using open source products and contributing back to the community to improve them based on what we are doing," he said. "This should help us to avoid being tied to one specific supplier or technology but will also allow us to contribute to some of the interesting and novel cloud tools that are emerging -- hopefully making these tools more useable for organisations like HMRC."
In digitising, HMRC will be "open to a radical redesign of current processes" and build new services with users in mind, Sohi said.