Home Office opens AWS cash firehose a little wider with police IT deal The Home Office wants to dump all of Britain’s national-level police IT onto Amazon Web Services' public cloud. A contract note on UK.gov’s Digital Marketplace revealed that the Home Office wants a "partner" to migrate coppers' computing "from a traditional on-premise data centre to Amazon Web Services". “The software and …
"And in other news, the RAF will be renting its F-35 frontline fighter jets off Lockheed Martin and Theresa May will be renting her shoes off Marks & Spencer using her existing M&S account."
That would actually make more sense since, unlike your virtual servers, your jets and shoes can't instantly disappear. But if they could then that could suddenly leave you without jets and shoes in the middle of a crisis and people would understand why renting them would be a bad idea :)
Given how many data breaches we have seen from Amazon hosting platforms, it is truly terrifying how much personal data the British government are putting at risk with this strategy. The next data breach (sure as the sunrise there will be one) it will make the HMRC NI data loss look like small beer, and worse still, with no accountability or responsibility for anything in Government or the civil service, nothing will happen. After all, who went to prison / got fired over the HMRC NI cock-up?
The announcement refers specifically to the Public services provided by the police. That is, it refers to material that will be OFFICIAL as far as the GSC is concerned. It will be all the tedious garbage about meeting your PCSO, bicycle security stamping, public event policing, traffic, accidents and crime statistics, newsletters and puff pieces about what a wonderful chap the ACC is. It will not be a repository for criminal records, case work, forensic data etc.
Although I haven't worked on this delivery I have seen some of the other stuff heading to AWS and it's largely non-contentious. I hear from "people who know" that AWS is offering a better security model than other providers and the contracts are regarded as less painful than those of other providers. Also it's much cheaper than G-Cloud offerings.
Yes, we need scrutiny of how our money is being spent, but the HO seems to be being responsible, this time around.
Besides, a new DC costs around £25 million does anyone seriously think that an SME will build one of those? SME's just get to provide services to big integrators and in this case there seems more opportunity to work supplying services to/via AWS than expecting on of the big suppliers to let SMEs supply capability via their services. It also offers the real possibility of remote working, something that is very hard to do at present for any government IT. Although even there, attitudes are changing.
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