08 April 2019

Police forces across the UK have been urged to adopt cloud computing, in a freedom of information (FOI) report.

The survey, carried out by US-based cloud software multinational Citrix, found that migrating to the cloud could help free up valuable resources for the most underfunded and overstretched forces in the country.

It approached 43 forces – and of the 24 that responded, 75 per cent said they still access and manage their data and applications on-premise.

In total, 71 per cent of forces currently store less than a quarter of their data and applications in a cloud environment, while an additional 13 per cent said that none of their data and applications are stored “in the cloud”.

The findings jar with the “cloud first” policy introduced by the government back in 2013, which recommended all public sector organisations should consider the cloud above all other solutions when procuring new or existing services.

However, there were some positives to be taken from the data. The report found that 88 per cent of forces said they were considering investing in cloud infrastructure and technologies such as software, platform or infrastructure as a service (SaaS, PaaS or IaaS) within the next 12 months.

Furthermore, over two thirds (67 per cent) said they planned to outsource or downsize their physical IT infrastructure in favour of a cloud model within the next twelve months, with 25 per cent already having done so.