The NPDS set out a ten-year digital ambition for UK policing. The programme is well underway, and forces are navigating cloud adoption, legacy constraints, and the infrastructure choices that determine whether modernisation delivers. Here’s where things stand.
The National Policing Digital Strategy (NPDS) set out a ten-year roadmap for UK policing, running from 2020 to 2030. Its core argument was straightforward: cloud infrastructure and modern data services are foundational to the kind of policing the country needs. Faster intelligence, better collaboration across forces, and the operational agility to respond to crime that increasingly has no geographic boundary.
The programme is now well underway. Most forces are somewhere in the middle of it. Not at the starting line, and not at the finish. The work is real, the direction is broadly right, and the infrastructure questions it raises are harder than the strategy document suggested.
The strategy built on the Policing Vision 2025, identifying the data and technology capabilities UK policing would need to operate effectively in a digitally disrupted environment. Cloud was central: a more modular technology estate, secure data transmission between applications, and a platform for innovation to scale across the service rather than being re-solved, expensively, by each force independently.
The ambition was right. The challenge has been execution. Not because forces lack the intent, but because the technology estate they’re modernising is large, varied, and subject to operational and information assurance requirements that have no equivalent in most other sectors.
The legacy constraint is real and persistent. Core custody, intelligence, and command-and-control systems were not designed for cloud-era working. Some can be migrated; others will need to run on-premise for years while new capabilities are built around them. The NPDS acknowledged this, but the practical implication is that most forces are operating in hybrid territory for the foreseeable future.
Cloud adoption, including AWS’s Police Assured Landing Zone (PALZ), gives forces a way to begin. PALZ provides a cloud environment designed to meet policing’s specific assurance and security requirements, making it possible to test and build new capabilities without committing to full infrastructure overhaul. For forces at the early stages, it is a useful starting point: stand up a sandpit environment, demonstrate value against agreed outcomes, and build the business case for the next step.
The question the NPDS implicitly raises, and which forces are now having to answer concretely, is what the network and security layer underneath looks like when the estate spans legacy on-premise systems, cloud workloads, mobile and remote officers, and data shared with partner agencies.
For a force running across headquarters, divisional stations, custody suites, control rooms, and mobile data terminals, with officers working from fixed and dynamic locations, the infrastructure requirements are significant.
Connectivity has to be resilient and consistent across every part of the estate. Headquarters, divisional stations, custody suites and control rooms all need the same reliable foundation.
Security has to follow the officer wherever they work. When the user is in the field, in a custody suite, or accessing systems from a third-party site, the controls in place at headquarters do not apply unless the security model is designed to travel with them.
Operational evidence has to be continuous. UK policing operates against information assurance standards that require ongoing evidence of security controls, generated as the service runs rather than assembled before each assessment cycle.
Change has to happen without risk to live operations. Forces cannot take frontline systems offline to modernise. Whatever the migration path looks like, it has to be incremental, reversible, and evidenced at each stage.
The NPDS does not require forces to solve everything at once. Neither does the infrastructure that supports it. Most forces begin with one specific gap: secure multi-site connectivity, a managed security layer that follows officers into the field, or a cloud connectivity path that reaches existing systems without disrupting them. They expand from there as the programme matures.
The platform that solves the first problem should be the same one that solves the next. That is what makes modernisation sustainable rather than a sequence of disconnected projects.
Cloud Gateway works with UK police forces on the connectivity, security and operational assurance layer that NPDS-aligned modernisation depends on. For more on how we work in policing, see our Policing sector page.
