UK Home Office opens AWS cash firehose even wider with £100m public cloud services deal The UK's Home Office has tossed a contract worth up to £100m of taxpayer cash at Amazon Web Services to renew a public cloud hosting agreement with the hyper tax efficient American giant for four years. The contract was published on Contracts Finder this week but the start date was actually on 12 December and it runs until 11 …
AWS does have UK regions/DCs available (as does Azure), normally the criteria for sensitive data or certain government functions is that their data has to be retained on servers hosted in a domestic DC.
As for companies from another country being involved, this isn't anything new. You've had the likes of DXC (formerly HPE/EDS), Accenture, ATOS and other large IT multinationals providing hosting, outsourcing and other BPO-style services to government departments for decades.
"...sensitive data or certain government functions is that their data has to be retained on servers hosted in a domestic DC."
Of course, but the whole lot could still be switched off from the US? It may not be a new situation, but increasing reliance on companies outside of our control surely can't be wise? I suppose there's the special relationship though so it won't ever be an issue :-\
Government is at fault for companies using legal loopholes to avoid paying their (and I'm not even going to say "fair share of") tax.
That is it and that is all it is. We could argue till the cows come home about "ethical" or "whats right" but we live in a money centric society and it will never change until there is political will to change it. As to whether we should award them contracts does anyone really think the 100m going to another cloud provider would have wielded anymore tax? I doubt it very much.
Using AWS (or any other cloud provider for that matter) is NOT outsourcing. They provide hardware and software in a data centre that the customer (or their chosen OUTSOURCER). Are you proposing that the government manufacture its own hardware and write its own operating systems and databases, etc?
Another avenue for IT jobs to disappear down, thanks a lot. Personally, based on experience I would not trust AWS with UK citizens data and critical services.
I hope risk IT management practices are being improved in government.
Remember AWS are cheap for a reason and its not because they love the UK
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HMG should be ashamed of itself for awarding contracts to companies that are wrecking our high streets, have less than stellar records when it comes to human rights and employment practices, and practice aggressive tax avoidance. That’s before we even get to the very pertinent question about the wisdom of handing over vast quantities of the UK’s most sensitive data to a foreign entity
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