Home Office preps for migration of police IT systems to AWS cloud

The Home Office is on the cusp of a year-long upgrade and migration project that will see core IT systems used by police forces nationwide moved to the Amazon Web Services (AWS) public cloud.

The government department is currently on the hunt for an IT partner to assist with the project, which is due to start on 1 October 2018, as confirmed in a recently published Digital Marketplace tender document.

The systems earmarked for migration are relied on by police forces across England and Wales, and are currently hosted in an on-premise datacentre – but, according to the document, need updating.

“The Police Open Systems currently reside in a traditional datacentre and provide extended capability to police forces on top of the services provided by the Police National Computer,” the document reads.

“The software and infrastructure on which these systems reside is not of a satisfactory status or versioning, and as such there is a desire to migrate these systems to Amazon Web Services.”

Therefore, prospective suppliers will be required to design a supporting architecture in the AWS cloud for the system to run in, consisting of storage, networking and compute components.

They will also play a hands-on role in transitioning its on-premise systems to go-live in AWS, while supporting the work of the Home Office’s existing in-house project team, which already consists of a programme and project manager, as well as enterprise and technical architects.

Home Office said it is currently classified as being in the “discovery” phase, as the department continues to scope out the user requirements of the work.

No budget has been specified for the project, but the document does state that an existing AWS subscription is in place at the Home Office and will be used in the delivery of the project.

According to the Digital Marketplace’s G-Cloud spending figures, the Home Office has spent more than any other government department on AWS, having procured £14.81m of cloud services from the firm so far. 

The supplier has enjoyed something of a meteoric rise in recent years, in terms of how much money the public sector now spends with it, following the opening of its first UK datacentre in late 2016. 

When its UK datacentre region first opened, the cloud services giant had secured a modest £2.93m in spend through the G-Cloud framework since it began. This figure has risen significantly since to £31.5m.