Home Office: Internet

(asked on 14th March 2022) - View Source

Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, how many of her Department's services are hosted on public cloud providers; and which of those services are hosted on (a) Amazon Web Services, (b) Microsoft Azure and (c) Google Cloud Platform.


Answered by
Tom Pursglove Portrait
Tom Pursglove
Minister of State (Minister for Legal Migration and Delivery)
This question was answered on 18th March 2022

The Home Office, as with other government departments follows the Government Digital Service (GDS) advice to move towards Public cloud first for our computing needs. This allows us to build scale, flexibility and control into our applications and infrastructure.

The Home Office is a large user of both AWS and Azure. The use of these capabilities varies from business application deployments to encrypted storage and compute. This is supplemented by robust and targeted private hosting capabilities. We do not use Google Cloud Platform at this point.

At the time of answering this the department has over 250 different application groupings on AWS and Azure. This will include duplications where services may have Development, Test, Pre-product and production environments in either or both.

The Home Office uses ServiceNow’s Software as a Service based service. This is used predominately for IT related service and management based on their ITIL model. The service provided is a private enterprise cloud service, fully owned and operated by ServiceNow with Home Office managing the configuration and use.

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