Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what assessment her Department has made of the (a) efficiency and (b) effectiveness of using Amazon Web Services as a public cloud hosting service.

The Home Office recently completed a procurement for “Continuity Cloud Services”. We assessed a wide number of Cloud Service Providers available on G-Cloud 11.

This was awarded to Amazon Web Services via G-Cloud 11 on the basis of best technical fit for existing Home Office requirements and met all of our ‘must have’ requirements.The procurement has enabled the Home Office to take advantage of discounts and savings opportunities available on G-Cloud 11.

Under this new contract we are already on track to save 28% or over £6m over the next 12 months on our cloud spend with Amazon Web Services compared to what we would have spent if we had extended our previous contract based on old terms. The Home Office follows best practice for Cost Efficiency, we continually review our cloud spend to ensure that we are getting best value for money.

We take regular action to ensure that our usage is optimised, and we receive regular support from AWS via their Enterprise Support Programme. The Home Office is looking to achieve further efficiencies on cloud services by contracting with a wider number of cloud service providers in the future.