Taking advantage of the cloud: Experience from working at a national force
Policing and law enforcement have much to gain from leveraging the technologies and hyperscale capabilities that are offered by the cloud. The opportunities, and the potential gains in public safety, cannot be ignored. But in adopting cloud, police forces face challenges and risks unlike those faced by other organisations, which can lead to uncertainty and delays in progress.
Police forces are grappling with the challenges of ageing legacy systems, and near-critical capacity shortages. They may also be struggling to collaborate with other forces and partners, due to the disparate and fragmented solutions in use across the sector. In addition, they are managing highly-sensitive data which must be handled with particular regard to security and data protection.
In the face of these challenges, we often see forces looking to develop strategies and protocols to mandate the ways in which their force will leverage the cloud. It is crucial to ensure that these strategies are carefully designed and implemented - the wrong approach may stifle growth and innovation - or could encourage teams to circumvent governance, leading to “cloud sprawl” without clear strategic direction.
Steps a police force could potentially take
Wherever your force is in its cloud adoption journey, there are steps you can take to gain advantage from the cloud in the most secure and cost-effective way.
Earlier in the journey, this could range from defining your cloud adoption strategy and roadmap, through to assessing your technology landscape to identify which solutions would benefit most from cloud migration.
An initial cloud strategy should answer some basic questions:
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What services are suitable to go on cloud? You may find an evaluation framework is helpful in making these decisions. The framework could include factors such as reusability of existing solutions, risk assessment, technical profile assessment, strategic and cost profile assessment. Once you have a framework, you can design templates that business users need to complete when they want to move services to the cloud. This information would then allow the force to score the requirement against a set of priorities to decide whether the business use case in question is suitable for cloud or not.
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Should we use a single cloud (using only one cloud company) or multi-cloud approach (using more than one cloud company)? An analysis needs to be performed that looks at the pros and cons of each option for your individual circumstances.
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What steps should someone follow if they want to explore the use of a cloud-based solution? There should be a clear process for approving, commissioning and trialling cloud-based solutions.
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What changes are needed to the operating model to enable a force to manage a cloud-based consumption model? A force will need to know who has consumed what amount of cloud services so that it can decide how to recharge based on usage. Security of the cloud environment will also need to be considered.
If you’re already progressing towards cloud maturity the focus and steps you can take could move towards:
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reviewing and reducing your cost base
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assessing your cyber security posture to address any vulnerabilities, or
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establishing an innovation capability to rapidly build experimental proof-of-concept solutions and explore leading-edge technologies.
Cloud transformation brings unparalleled opportunities to change the way your force works. Today, the question isn’t whether you’re going to move to the cloud but how you’ll do it and how fast.
Authors:
Muz Janoowalla (Twitter Handle: @Statman_Who)
Colin Lampard
Georgie Morgan
Georgie joined techUK as the Justice and Emergency Services (JES) Programme Manager in March 2020, then becoming Head of Programme in January 2022.