Which cloud approach is best for the police?
Simon Hall, CEO, PoliceBox discusses the options available to the police forces in the UK with regards to cloud infrastructure
Simon Hall, CEO, PoliceBox discusses the options available to the police forces in the UK with regards to cloud infrastructure
While “Cloud First” has resulted in the bulk of the UK public sector rapidly adopting cloud infrastructure since 2013, the cloud only really became a legitimate option for the police in 2017 when the UK’s National Police Information Risk Management Team accredited the major UK cloud providers to store and access police information. Forces across the country have begun to seriously evaluate the role that the cloud should play in their infrastructure. What options are available to them?
It is worth taking a step back to briefly remind ourselves of the benefits of cloud computing vs the status quo of building and maintaining your own datacentre. The cloud may be the default position for the public sector, but it still needs a compelling business case. So, what are the benefits police forces should expect from migrating to the cloud? These can be briefly summarised as; lower operational and setup costs, industry-leading security (the specialist security skills of the large cloud providers simply cannot be matched in-house), scalability (spin up more resources at the touch of a button), improved resilience and disaster recovery, and lastly, simplicity; cloud services are generally much simpler to manage because many of the routine processes, such as updating operating systems and software, are handled by the cloud provider as an automated service. All of these add up to a compelling case for police forces to adopt the cloud.
Like so many things, the “cloud” comes in many flavours. It is not simply a choice of cloud or no cloud, but which cloud, or more accurately, how much cloud are you comfortable with?
What makes SaaS so suitable to UK police forces? In most instances, when you move your IT services from a self-hosted datacentre to a private cloud provider, you are still using someone else’s software e.g. SAP, Oracle, Microsoft etc. If you are building or buying a cloud infrastructure simply to run someone else’s software, why not use their hardware too? If the software provider offers a SaaS option, forces would do well to evaluate it.
SaaS can deliver results to a force more quickly than all of the other cloud options because it does not automatically require any type of migration. This makes it a very good starting point because a force can leverage new technology without having to write-off its existing datacentre investments. While it does need some investment, such as integrating with a cloud-based identity management system, this is considerably cheaper and lower risk than migrating the force’s entire datacentre to an IaaS or PaaS tenancy.
SaaS offers all of the benefits of the cloud but with very few drawbacks; you can quickly add new capabilities and users at relatively low risk and cost, there is minimal or zero capital outlay, and SaaS providers practice the highest standards of security and availability (as a minimum, SaaS services are secured using HTTPS / TLS1.2 and accessed by a cloud-based identity management system such as Azure Active Directory).
When it comes to cloud, going “all in” by putting all of your IT services into your own cloud tenancy might not be the right approach. Exploring digitisation and cloud options is an opportunity to review all the solutions out there. It is not simply a matter of lifting everything you already have and putting it into a cloud server, but of finding better ways of doing things which deliver a police force fit for the 21st century.
If a supplier offers you the choice between hosting their solution in your cloud tenancy or theirs (i.e. as a SaaS service), there are very few reasons why you would not choose their tenancy (i.e. consume it as SaaS).