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Home Office opens AWS cash firehose a little wider with police IT deal

Contract notice reveals yet another UK.gov systems migration to Bezos cloud

The Home Office wants to dump all of Britain’s national-level police IT onto Amazon Web Services' public cloud.

A contract note on UK.gov’s Digital Marketplace revealed that the Home Office wants a "partner" to migrate coppers' computing "from a traditional on-premise data centre to Amazon Web Services".

“The software and infrastructure on which these [Open Police Systems] currently reside is not of a satisfactory status or versioning,” the contract offer stated. The project is expected to last one year from 1 October 2018.

Accordingly, the Home Office wants to bring in an external "partner" to design new AWS-based architecture for the existing Police Systems, inclusive of storage, network and compute components, support accreditation, management and provision of the architecture and support during the migration of the services.

The lucky company will get to work with a four-strong Home Office tech team that includes an enterprise architect and a technical architect, with the job being spread across Croydon and Hendon.

In the FAQ for the bid the Home Office explicitly refused to say how much they want to pay for this, though hopeful bidders have until 28 August to throw their hats into the ring.

In addition to the usual AWS IaaS, Paas and SaaS skills, successful bidders will also need knowhow of Oracle Databases (and licensing, natch) from version 10 onwards, Java, Red Hat and more. All staff involved in the project must be security cleared to SC level and NPPV3 Police Clearance is “desired”.

The full note is on the Digital Marketplace.

UK govt's top tech heavyweight Maxwell quits for Amazon job

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The explicit naming of AWS as preferred end supplier equates to one more chunk of the British public sector that is being served by the cloud giant, and comes a week after The Reg exclusively revealed that head of tech for UK.gov Liam Maxwell is set to join AWS from October.

According to figures collated by TechMarketView, AWS was the fastest growing tech infrastructure provider in the UK in 2017, growing more than 40 per cent year on year to £550m. A fifth of this was estimated to pertain to the public sector.

The continued awarding of business to AWS will fuel critics of the corporation’s tax-efficient accounting practices - it turned over £98.8m in sales according to Profit & Loss account for calendar 2017. It paid £1.7m in tax.

Handing more business to AWS also doesn’t play too well with the UK government’s claims that it wants to procure a third of its goods and services with SMEs. ®

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