Home Office seeks suppliers for one-year project to migrate services from datacentre to public cloud
National computing systems that support police forces across England and Wales are to be moved from an on-premises datacentre to an Amazon Web Services public-cloud environment.
The Home Office has issued a contract notice via the Digital Marketplace seeking a supplier to undertake the one-year project, which will involve the “design of new AWS architecture to support existing police systems, inclusive of all storage, network and compute elements”. The services moved are those that constitute the Police Open Systems.
Those systems are a central resource that provide “extended capability to police forces on top of the services provided by the Police National Computer” – a nationwide hub that containing several databases, in which are stored millions of law-enforcement records.
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The contract notice said: “The software and infrastructure on which [the Police Open Systems] reside is not of a satisfactory status or versioning, and as such there is a desire to migrate these systems to Amazon Web Services.”
The project to move the systems to the cloud is expected to take 12 months, and will include the design of an AWS-based environment, followed by the transition of services, support for user testing, and setting services live.
The project – for which the Home Office has declined to specify a budget – is currently in discovery phase, during which a number of internal exercises have already been undertaken. The Home Office indicated that it has an existing AWS subscription that can be used to cover the ultimate hosting needs of the project.
The department is looking for a supplier that can provide a team of three to five people that offer “a range of architecture, development and security skill sets”. Work will primarily take place during standard office hours at Home Office Sites in Croydon and Hendon.
Suppliers have until 28 August to bid for the work, with a contract scheduled to commence on 1 October.
