THE BRITISH ARMY
Adoption of the cloud across entire British Army When it comes to the cloud and its new role in businesses , the word frequently used to describe the transition is ‘ migration ’, suggesting a monumental shift of data information , services , and capabilities from one place into the cloud . For the British Army ’ s use of the cloud , though , Crossfield prefers different terminology .
“ As we ' ve begun to deliver , we ' ve realised that we ' re not migrating , we ' re adopting cloud , because we won ' t move everything . And by moving some stuff , we mean that we might be able to exploit our on-prem facilities in a different way . So we haven ’ t thrown the baby out with the bath water is , I suppose , the best way to put it . Cloud adoption for us is a joint server farm .”
As such , this joint server farm has multiclouds for the Army to utilise . But how does this impact overall security ?
“ It ' s all artificial sensitive . And we learned some good lessons , the biggest of which was the support that we had to provide to the user , the owner , and the application leads because they own it . We ' re not delivering mono-cloud for them ; they own their bit of mono-cloud that ' s hosting their service , and that ' s a cultural change , right ? To me , that ’ s the biggest opportunity of the cloud : to culturally change people to become more aware of the importance of being digitally capable , able to manage their own service ’ s applications , their own hosting computer store .”
Crossfield continues : “ So that ' s gone . We learnt the lessons . We ' ve got a partner at the moment who ' s helping us design our plan to adopt cloud more broadly for the remainder of what we ' ve got in the Army ' s on-prem environment .”
56 January 2023