As it continues to face a litany of questions seeking details of the planned identity regime, the government has now indicated that the supporting infrastructure will be on UK shores

All data gathered and processed by the UK’s planned digital identity regime will be hosted in IT storage facilities based in the UK, a minister has said.

Many government agencies now rely heavily on public cloud services delivered by US-based vendors – chiefly Amazon Web Services, whose clients include the Cabinet Office and the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, which are jointly working on delivery of the new national digital ID.

While data related to new virtual identity – use of which will be a mandatory part of all pre-employment checks – will be kept in a cloud environment, the physical datacentre facilities used for this storage will be situated in the UK, according to junior Cabinet Office minister Josh Simons.

“Data associated with the digital ID system will be held and kept safe in secure cloud environments hosted in the United Kingdom,” he said, in response to a written parliamentary question from Liberal Democrat MP Martin Wrigley. “The government will work closely with expert stakeholders to make the programme effective, secure and inclusive, including taking insights from previous IT projects where appropriate.”

Hundreds of millions of pounds have been spent by government on AWS services in recent years, much of which has gone through the One Government Value Agreement (OGVA), which is now in its second three-year iteration.

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The arrangement, first introduced in 2020, is a memorandum of understanding between the Crown Commercial Service and the cloud vendor, which offers discounts to all government public bodies by, effectively, treating the public sector as a single customer. While commercial details of both the first and second versions of OGVA have not been publicised, PublicTechnology exclusively revealed that the initial iteration offered an across-the-board baseline discount of 18% on cloud hosting services, with a further price reduction of up to 2% available when services were paid for upfront.

While AWS is the dominant force in the Whitehall cloud scene, Microsoft also has some notable footholds – and the two firms jointly account for about 80% of the wider UK market, according to a report earlier this year from the Competition and Markets Authority. That study concluded that the duo of tech giants held “significant unilateral market power… [which] harms competition in cloud services in the UK”. The CMA proposed implementing measures that would curb the power of AWS and Microsoft and thereby promote greater competition.

Whether provided by the big two or one of a number of smaller players, the growing importance of cloud infrastructure was reflected by the decision last year to classify datacentres as part of the UK’s critical national infrastructure. The CNI designation means that companies operating IT hosting facilities can “expect greater government support in recovering from and anticipating critical incidents”, according to the government.