Met Police to start shift to Microsoft's Azure cloud following two-year deal with New Signature

G-Cloud framework deal part of Met Police's IT modernisation programme

The Metropolitan Police has signed a two-year deal with Microsoft reseller New Signature via the G-Cloud framework that will see it start migrating IT services to the Azure cloud.

The cloud shift was outlined in the Met's One Met Digital Policing Strategy 2017-2020 document published in February last year.

That strategy made clear that the Met would "adopt public cloud offerings as part of our

‘Cloud First' principle. We will only maintain our own Met data centres for specialised services. Where we need specialised services, we will utilise virtual private cloud, and similar technologies, to provide consolidated, virtualised, commoditised infrastructure".

It continued: "Our cloud approach will allow us to only pay for the capacity and facilities that we use. We will also be able to rapidly move solutions if required (for example, where there is a commercial advantage), and flex our capacity up and down in response to key operational events.

"Our cloud approach will also allow us to more easily deliver applications via the Internet, opening up a range of possibilities for remote and mobile working."

This would go hand-in-hand with a data centre consolidation programme that should cut costs, it added.

New Signature described the deal as "one of the largest" G-Cloud procurements to date, but did not disclose its value.

Dan Scarfe, founder of New Signature told Computing's sister site Computer Reseller News that the deal marked a shift from the big systems integrators that have dominated public sector IT procurement. "They've been outsourced to the big GSIs [global systems integrators] forever, but this time around they wanted to do something different and work with a smaller, boutique cloud and decided to go with us," he told CRN.

Scarfe added that the Met wanted to move to the public cloud, partly to get away from in-house IT and unwieldy major services providers.

"I think they were looking for an organisation that was a specialist in this area, rather than the big GSIs that don't necessarily have quite the level of experience that we have we with pure-play environments," he said.

"They were looking for a company that could be more nimble and more closely aligned with their new digital policing strategy, which is all around innovation, agility and doing things differently."

Angus McCallum, CIO for the Metropolitan Police, said: "We are very pleased to have selected New Signature to help us as we start to develop and implement our 'Cloud-First Strategy' transition.

"The Met is committed to ensuring all our people have the right technology to do their jobs with excellence and New Signature's involvement is a critical part of building our capability and achieving fast results."