Tag: Home Office

AWS gets three year cloud contract with Home Office

Posted on December 5, 2023 by - News

The Home Office has signed a three-year cloudy deal with Amazon Web Services (AWS) valued at £450,281,369.

The contract falls under the G-Cloud 13 framework and is to provide public cloud hosting services to the Home Office. T

This latest agreement follows a series of collaborations between the Home Office and AWS, which are becoming increasingly controversial.

Last year, a report from the Centre for International Corporate Tax Accountability and Research (CICTAR) and think tank TaxWatch revealed that AWS has secured UK public sector contracts exceeding £600 million since 2017.

The report also highlighted concerns about tax payments, with AWS allegedly avoiding £84 million in taxes during the same period.

Government spends half its IT budget on outdated systems

Posted on August 6, 2021 by - News

A Cabinet Office report called Organising for Digital Delivery has found that the government spends half of its £4.7 billion IT budget patching out of date systems.

The report said that the UK government spends £2.3 billion a year on patching legacy IT systems, making up half of the £4.7bn it spends on IT each year.

The UK government could spend £13- £22 billion over the next five years on maintaining its outdated IT systems.

The so-called “technical debt” racked up by the government stems from its use of “obsolete technical platforms” using programming languages that are no longer widely supported.

Some IT systems fail to meet “even the minimum of cybersecurity standards”.

Home Office denies helping build a sales pipeline for a supplier

Posted on April 20, 2021 by - News

The UK’s Home Office wants to spend at least £5 million contract to recruit a supplier to help manage the selection of its IT projects.

The notice published in the public sector Digital Marketplace is seeking a company to help deliver and operate the “discovery-as-a-service” capability for the “Innovation – Law Enforcement” (I-LE) function within the Police and Public Protection Technology Portfolio (PPPT), with a £5 million contract. Parse that.

However, the contract leaves open the possibility of the winning supplier managing the project selection process in favour of services it offers which appears a little unfair to the compeition.

Samsung provides smartphones to UK emergency services

Posted on November 27, 2017 by - News, Products

fire_brigadeSamsung has inked a deal with the UK’s emergency services to provide smartphones to 250,000 police, paramedics and fire crews.

The UK Home Office is preparing to deploy an upgraded network and phones for use by police, firemen, and ambulances.

Samsung will be supplying its specially designed smartphones from 2018.

Previous disaster phones supported only voice calls, but the new phones support mobile data services, video live streaming, and come with various applications for use by trained professionals.

The company will also supply various accessories for use with the phones.

The South Korean tech giant first showed off the public safety use gear back in June 2015, which are based on public safety LTE standards.

It was last year selected as the vendor to provide South Korea with a boosted emergency services network. In February this year, it showed off live video streaming between handsets and mission control.

The business is part of Samsung’s enterprise mobile portfolio. The firm also collaborated with SK Telecom to redeploy South Korea’s first LTE-R service.

The British Home Office awarded Samsung the three-year contract, which will see the Koreans supply toughened, water-resistant 4G devices to emergency services.

These smartphones will offer both hardware and software features that will support emergency services functions and critical voice services, according to Samsung, including a “push to talk” button.

 

Apple iPhone is favoured by thieves

Posted on September 8, 2014 by - News

Apple_iPhone_5_white-330x330A report from the UK Home Office said that thieves are brand conscious and prefer stealing Apple iPhones compared to the rest of the pack.

The report said over 50 percent of all phones stolen between January 2012 to January 2014 were iPhones.  Other brands appealing to thieves are Blackberry and Samsung devices. People who have had their phones stolen believe the value of the personal data to be more than £760.

While vendors have made improvements to security that appear to have put off some thieves, the report analyses their effectiveness in some detail.

It suggests that the introduction of Apple iOS7 this time last year “has affected the black market value of some stolen iPhones”.  An analysis based in London suggests reduction in thefts because of iOS7.

phonechart

Samsung’s intro of Find my Mobile and the Reactivation Lock have also probably reduced thefts.

People worried about losing their mobile phones should register their mobile devices at no cost at immmobilise.com, use PIN locks, don’t leave your phone hanging about, install a tracker app.  If a phone is stolen, it should be reported to the network straight away, and report it to your local cop shop.