Good? Law enforcement shouldn't be relying on pinky-promises of foreign corporations that they'll keep information confidential anyway, so if this keeps them from using MS SaaS, all the better. That this will force Scotland to develop enough native IT expertise to replace these services (which may one day grow into a viable business) is just an added bonus.
What they need is the functional equivalent of a basement with filing cabinets. And used to be just that. Countries of any size should do this in-house. I cannot overemphasize how bad an idea outsourcing police records is.
And did we forget computers were supposed to make paperwork easier? And now just storing the paperwork requires a foreign multinational company.
Is it just me or this a non-story? Police Scotland (rightly, and apparently thoroughly) did due diligence on whether O365 is suitable for their use case, and Microsoft (rightly) told them no it’s not. And yet somehow there’s a Lib Dem peer saying we need “UK Cloud capability” as if it’s some sort of nuclear arsenal rather than software running in data centres.
In all fairness, I don't see how they're wrong in saying we need a UK Cloud Capability even if phrased 'as if it’s some sort of nuclear arsenal'. It is actually quite problematic that falling out with Microsoft would mean the entire country grounding to a halt at best.
We can spin up a custom instance for a huge amount of money effort (e.g govcloud) but off the shelf it goes wherever there's free space or similar?