Nearly half of UK police forces are using hybrid cloud

Police forces' hybrid cloud usage has more than doubled in the last 12 months

A Freedom of Information (FoI) request from Citrix has shown that nearly half of police forces in the UK are migrating to a hybrid-cloud model to store, access and manage their data.

Forty-seven per cent of police organisations are using the hybrid cloud, compared to just 21 per cent in 2019.

Cloud unlocks the benefit of massive computational power, without the need to invest in on-premise infrastructure. Police officers equipped with mobile devices can quickly access information in the field, enabling them to spend less time at a desk and more time on the streets; and 94 per cent of the responding forces said that their officers could use mobile devices in this way.

However, Citrix's FoI request - sent to 48 police forces in the UK, of which 34 responded - found that 74 per cent of forces are still accessing and managing their applications and data on-premises.

The majority of departments (91 per cent) are planning to invest further in cloud technologies and infrastructure - such as platform-, software- or infrastructure-as-a-service (PaaS, SaaS or IaaS) - within the next 12 months.

That is up three per cent from 2019, when 88 per cent said they were considering investing in cloud.

Half (50 per cent) of respondents confirmed that they are currently outsourcing or trimming their physical IT infrastructure in favour of a cloud model.

The information also revealed that UK police forces have spent nearly £21 million on outsourcing IT over the last five years - about £4 million each year.

Only one in ten of the departments who responded to the request said they use a public cloud environment to access and manage their data. That is despite the "Cloud First" policy, which the government introduced in 2013, advising all public sector organisations to consider public cloud solutions when procuring new or existing IT services.

The Government Cloud Strategy states that 'by exploiting innovations in cloud computing we will transform the public sector ICT estate into one that is agile, cost effective and environmentally sustainable.'

"These new findings highlight that cloud deployments are clearly a key enabler for improved service delivery - due to solutions typically being cost effective, scalable, secure and flexible - with the majority of police forces prioritising further investment in cloud infrastructure and technologies over the next twelve months," said Matt Smith, Director, UKI Public Sector, Citrix.

"The reality is police work still requires an immense amount of human time - from preventative to investigative work. Amidst such budget challenges, it's critical that police officers are able to work in the most efficient way possible, and forces have identified the cloud is a clear enabler in this process," he added.