The Metropolitan Police has taken a step in line with its ‘cloud first’ policy with a deal with New Signature to support a move to Microsoft cloud services.
The London police service has signed the company to help deploy and optimise a new cloud environment based on the Microsoft Azure platform over the next few months, then to provide support in understanding the requirements and developing an innovation programme for its business units.
The move will be supported by a new network operations centre optimised for the police force’s security requirements.
New Signature said: “This dynamic environment will be the core platform for launching ground breaking new capabilities with increased speed, efficiency and security.”
The procurement was carried out through the G-Cloud framework and is reported to be one of the largest to date.
It reflects an element of the One Met Model 2020, published last year, emphasising the move to public cloud offerings for most services in which they can meet the Met’s obligations under the Data Protection Act and General Data Protection Regulation. The strategy says the Met Police will only maintain its own data centres or use a virtual private cloud for some specialised service.
Flexibility
It also emphasises the ability to use cloud services to make more use of internet applications in support of mobile working, quickly change solutions if required, and to scale its operating capacity up and down in response to operational demands.
Angus McCallum, the Met Police’s chief information officer, said: “The Met is committed to ensuring all of our people have the right technology to do their jobs with excellence and New Signature’s involvement is a critical part of building our capability and achieving fast results.”
Other elements of the One Met Model 2020 include the deployment of Microsoft Office 365 as the core office productivity platform and redeploying existing equipment from the force’s old data centres.
Image from Metropolitan Police Service
