Building the network foundation for digital policing

Almost every ambition in a modern policing strategy depends on the network. Cloud-hosted case management, body-worn video, AI-assisted triage, data sharing across force boundaries: all of it rides on infrastructure that was, in many cases, designed for a different era. The network is also the part of the estate least visible outside the IT directorate, which is why decisions taken a decade ago can quietly set the ceiling on what a force is able to do today.

Why the old shape holds forces back

Most legacy police networks are built hub-and-spoke. Every station, custody suite and office sends its traffic back to a central force site before it goes anywhere else.

It is much less so when they sit in Microsoft 365, a hyperscale cloud platform or a national policing service, because traffic from a station now has to travel to the force’s core network first, then back out to the internet, and the response has to make the same journey in reverse.

Carrying traffic to a central point like this is known as backhauling, and it creates three problems: congestion at the core, slower access to cloud services, and a concentration of risk in a single location. In an organisation where a connectivity failure can be a public safety risk rather than an IT inconvenience, this kind of architecture must be carefully designed and managed.

Rebuilding 64 sites around the cloud

Avon and Somerset Police’s 2022-2025 corporate strategy set out an ambition to be progressive in the use of technology and data, and to act as an exemplar for digital policing nationally. Their existing estate, built on legacy systems and tied to an incumbent supplier, could not support it. Resilience was thinner than the force was comfortable with, and cloud adoption was constrained by the shape of the network rather than by appetite or budget.

Working with Cloud Gateway, the force moved 64 Wide Area Network (WAN) sites onto a managed network and security platform. Each migrated site now has:

• direct, private access to cloud service providers and the Public Services Network, without backhauling via the main force network
• increased bearer bandwidth, with headroom to scale further on demand
• security policy enforced locally at the site edge, rather than centrally
• new customer premises equipment, meaning the router hardware at the site itself

From consumer to operator

The most valuable outcome is arguably not bandwidth. It is observability. With network, traffic and security data in one place, the force can see what its own network is doing and change it deliberately.

As one of the force’s senior infrastructure leads describes it, Avon and Somerset are now an active operator of their own network rather than a passive consumer, with capabilities such as Secure Web Gateway (SWG), SD-WAN and Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) available to add as they mature. None has to be bought up front – our platform is built so they can be activated when the force is ready.

Questions worth asking of your own estate

Whatever your specialism, three questions are worth putting to your IT directorate. Does traffic bound for the cloud currently leave the site directly, or does it travel via a central hub first? If your main site lost connectivity tomorrow, what stops working? And when the next national data-sharing or AI initiative arrives, will the network be an enabler or the thing that delays it?

Network modernisation rarely appears in a policing strategy as an outcome in its own right. It is usually the precondition for everything else in it.

Cloud Gateway is exhibiting at The Emergency Tech Show on 16-17 September at the NEC Birmingham, as part of the AWS Partner Zone. Register for your free ticket here.

Read about our work in policing here. Or talk to our team about your own estate here.

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