Police forces start shifting their data centre tin to Crown Hosting At least two police forces have signed contracts to shift their tin to the the government's Crown Hosting shared data centre and close their existing server farms, the head of the Police ICT Company, Martin Wyke, has said. Wyke estimates that almost every force currently has its own dedicated data centre. However, he said …
"However, he said consolidation of data centres will be a key to reducing cops' eye-wateringly expensive annual IT bill of £1bn."
Eggs, how do you like your new home, the basket?
Not to say that bill is not, as you say, eye-watering - but putting all "your monthly payments into one easily managed repayment" rarely works out either .....
Consultants job is to centralise what's decentralised, and decentralised what's centralised. That's because there is no right answer, merely two imperfect ones, and the other shades of imperfect in between.
I imagine yes it'll save some people some money, beyond politics there's no great advantage in having them as fragmented as they are seeing as they're all enforcing the same laws to what should be similar standards across the country.
Would love to know more detail. I guess this isn't operational kit - can you imagine the stress if a comms link dies, everything is oriented around command & control systems working. The buildings have to have resilience built in because no point in having a resilient data centre if your control room is out, so there aren't the massive savings you'd hope for there. The only real saving is in staff.
As for Ms May, there are two major command and control systems on the market, one is Windows and clicky and the other green screen and character based. The latter is much, much more reliable, much more efficient in the hands of trained users. Guess which one Ms May wants to standardise on?
What the Police really need is joined up IT with the CPS and Courts - you could take three to four hours out of a ten hour shift by letting CPS read the log rather than the Police having to prepare a case file for court for every charging decision.
Oh, and Crown Hosting "SC" cleared staff. Not good enough for the security audit on Faslane in my view. No way near unless the data security is watertight and off-site.
Well we'd not want G4S to have to pay to move all those separate IT systems together would we, that would be expensive and hard and make the privatisation less attractive. Much better to have us the public pay for the expensive consolidation at our risk.....
Wonder why there was no ITT to just centralise all the systems..
I suspect that as each force is independent and goes its own way, most of the savings over the first 10 years will be in reduced costs of data centre infrastructure, especially if the consolidated centre is in a low wage low property cost area.
Sharing hardware should give some economies of scale as well.
Presumably a minimum of two data centres with mirrored systems? Be a shame if one data centre had a hiccup (looking at you, Office 365).
Forcing one coherent system on different police authorities is likely to work as well as the single system for the NHS.
"Some 15 Home Office contracts are also set to move from the control of the Home Office to being looked after by the Police ICT company"
Why is a criminal investigations organization minding our data. Besides, won't this make it easier to perform data mining on all the consolidation information.
Won't that make a nice juicy target for the T'rrists. Hit the links to the centre and knock out the communications in one stroke. Run rampant with the emergency forces "crippled" because of lack of access to information.
Don't worry about the backup site/links... "Cost savings" will have ensured that they have been downgraded or, if the bean counters have their way, eliminated.
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