The Met Police Service has extended a contract with Datum Datacentres – paying £14 million to stay in its Hawk data centre for another six years.
The direct award covers operations until June 2031 and includes a potential two year extension, confirming the force’s long-term plans to stay in the centre, which underpins “next generation hosting platforms.”
Hawk and another data centre dubbed Condor are central to MPS hosting following the decision to decommission the older Eagle data centre, with plans from 2022 committing to an exit from the latter by July 2025.
The Stack could not immediately confirm if the Met has exited Eagle. But a 2025-2026 budget report, which showed a £256 million operational IT budget, said the period would include the "closure of a data centre and moving their services to the Crown-hosted shared service."
Hawk and Condor
Datum runs data centres in two locations, a 50,000 square foot facility in Farnborough, and two 20,000+ square feet facilities in Manchester.
The £4.5 million Condor centre was purpose-built for the force as part of its Data Centre Strategy in 2019, and the Met initially contracted to use it for a five-year term that is set to expire in September 2025.
The Met has also undertaken a major IT overhaul in the same period, consolidating its technology stack into a “two tower” model, featuring an Application Tower and Infrastructure Tower, with management of the former currently up for tender and the latter overseen by Capgemini.
Continued investment in the centres comes despite work elsewhere to move police data to the cloud, with the government beginning the transition out of a data centre, used for the Police National Computer, in Hendon, Greater London last year. The Met's 2021-2025 Digital Policing Strategy committed to a "cloud first policy" but stated applications would be hosted "in the right place" across on-premise and cloud infrastructure.
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