Cloud Computing for improved collaboration
Cloud computing has arguably been the 21st century’s equivalent of the 18th century industrial revolution accelerator, of steam power. As a consequence, much has, rightly so, been written about cloud, its various “everything as a service” incarnations and, its use cases and benefits, such that as I started to think about this blog I wanted to make sure I posited something relevant to Policing that isn’t just a rehash of all the usual stuff.
So, my thoughts turned to collaboration over disparate eco-systems and the way many public sector organisations should start to look at the opportunities that cloud provides, to co-operate on common purpose/cause in their respective remits.
There are obviously already many examples of data and process collaborations between government departments including across policing, but these tend to be long-standing traditional interactions. The question is how can the emerging adoption of hybrid cloud strategies across UK government, support a more pervasive and sophisticated approach to collaboration.
In contrast, many organisations in the private sector already exploit a hybrid cloud approach, to unite disparate users, customers, partners or, collaborators, forming wider complex eco-systems of inter-locking people, process and IT components. The most obvious example is in supply chains, where managing eco-systems at scale brings large operational, trust and administrative challenges, that cloud technology is uniquely able to address.
Public cloud providers recognise this and are increasingly selling eco-system collaboration as a benefit of the hybrid approach, where differentiated data security needs exist, such that more and more applications and workflow capability, spanning organisations across both private and public cloud, are now available.
This evolution of cloud ecosystem, brings together increasing numbers of participants to inter-operate in a common purpose and, provides improved access to resources and operational opportunities. It also gives organisations the flexibility to choose between service providers and resource management options.
Thinking about this more in the context of policing, there is already strong collaboration across individual forces (for instance on major, serious and organised crime), but there is a recognition in a number of reports, that IT Support is still disparate, with many different computer systems in use across regions causing officers and staff to have multiple log-ons.
This is potentially where Cloud Data Management platforms could provide some of the answer, working across hybrid environments, making the data management solution a hybrid itself, to support the need for fast, actionable data interpretation that responds to dynamic and evolving policing needs.
This in itself can lead to the potential to transform many tasks that police officers would be familiar with, such as the ability to:
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Upload, store, and secure massive quantities of data directly from mobile devices
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Access records from multiple databases at once
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Deploy and track emergency response units
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Enhance situational awareness
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Dictate and submit incident reports from the field
All of which has enhanced utility, when placed in a superset across police forces and ancillary policing organisations.
Essentially, this also speaks to opportunities associated to edge computing, but arguably this is nothing new, with shared databases such as Athena having been in existence for a while and in widespread use across various forces. The question though is how flexible this is moving forward and, whether there is a place for more ad-hoc arrangements that can quickly scale-up/scale-down in response to unpredictable operational needs.
This is certainly the promise that emergent Cloud Technologies and associated Services have and, something worth wider consideration in this fast paced world, where so much relies on timely Data Management, Insight and Action, in response to events that are inherently unpredictable and where reaction time is the difference between success and failure.
Author:
Pete Wilson, Pegasystems EMEA Public Sector Industry Architect
Georgie Morgan
Georgie joined techUK as the Justice and Emergency Services (JES) Programme Manager in March 2020, then becoming Head of Programme in January 2022.