Journey to the Cloud: A Strategy for Cloud Adoption in Policing
Journey to the Cloud is a strategy for cloud adoption in policing that has been inspired and informed by insights, strategies and techniques from some of the world’s leading cloud vendors.
Cloud as an enabler
Journey to the Cloud sets out how cloud can be an enabler for new capabilities and presents techniques and recommendations that can be adopted across projects and programmes to save time and effort. The strategy covers:
- The Why – Why cloud and the need for a strategy
- The What – A 5-stage cloud strategy with a core set of drivers
- The How – Techniques to consider while implementing the strategy
Journey to the Cloud is designed to help achieve the ambitions set out in the National Policing Digital Strategy 2020-30, which was launched at the Police ICT Summit in January. These ambitions being: seamless citizen experience; addressing harm; enabling officers and staff; embedding a whole public system approach; and empowering the private sector.
Specifically, the National Policing Digital Strategy 2020-30 recommends forces adopt a ‘cloud first’ principle for applications and data, with a target of c. 80% of policing technology to be hosted on the cloud.
The need for a baseline strategy
Journey to the Cloud has been created in recognition that forces are at different stages of the cloud journey. There are many approaches and with cloud providers offering a myriad of services, developing and implementing a cloud strategy that will serve the needs of each force can get confusing and difficult.
“The ambition is for Journey to the Cloud to serve as a baseline strategy that will help springboard adoption of cloud technologies within forces that are at the beginning of their cloud transitions, to help forces that are further along the journey better focus their efforts and to prevent fragmented thinking across the UK police service.“ – Simon Clifford, the Police ICT Company’s Director of Digital & Data
The strategy is underpinned by the frameworks and insights of the world’s leading cloud service providers, comprising factors and techniques that can be reused and adopted across projects and programmes to save time and effort. It has been developed from a national viewpoint, but with freedom for the forces to forge their own prioritisation and implementation paths.
Supporting the delivery of the National Policing Digital Strategy
The Police ICT Company is driven by a mission to support policing to keep people safe, get more from technology investments and make better use of public money. The Company has begun working with stakeholders across policing to deliver on the National Policing Digital Strategy’s ambitions, and Journey to the Cloud is only the beginning.