The London Metropolitan Police is moving forward with its plans for “Met Digital Transformation” and has chosen Microsoft Azure as its cloud provider, with a contract for cloud migration awarded to the UK’s New Signature, a Microsoft partner.
“Choosing to entrust their systems and applications in the cloud is a strong validation of the security and capabilities it offers. Being able to help them on that journey, over larger systems integrators and previous providers, is a watershed moment”, the company said in a release shared Friday.
Speaking to Computer Business Review, Dan Scarfe, Founder of New Signature UK, told us that the first step in the process is to: “Launch this service line; start to broadcast internally within the Met that this capability is now online and set up workshops.”
He added: “We have created this concept of a cloud clinic, which is like a drop-in clinic where different teams inside the Met can come along and talk to us about their applications and talk to us about the ideas that they have for new products and services. We then work with our architects to bring those things to reality.”
Met Digital Transformation
The move is in keeping with the force’s ‘One Met: Digital Policing Strategy’, which sees the Met lay out its plans from 2017 – 2020. Angus McCallum, the Metropolitan Police’s CIO, says the goal of the strategy is to set up systems and have technology that will be “intuitive, easy to use and user focused.”
“When buying new systems, the user will be at the heart of everything. Digital Policing will measure and manage customer satisfaction and seek to continually drive improvement.”
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The Metropolitan Police says it faces a growing need to move to a scalable infrastructure that can flex to the demands of the service, while also speeding up how quickly they can deploy new services.
Once the Met has migrated and established its large datasets in a cloud environment they can then utilises machine learning and data analytics techniques.
See Also: Home Office Unsatisfied with Police System, Seeks Help Moving to AWS
The plan calls for a cloud-first principle, and says current Met data centres will only be maintained and operated for specialised services.
“Where we need specialised services, we will utilise virtual private cloud, and similar technologies, to provide consolidated, virtualised, commoditised infrastructure,”
“We will leverage our hosting infrastructure investments by appropriate redeployment of existing equipment from our old data centres to our new facilities, repurposing hardware to provide a virtualised environment where possible,” the report notes.
