CPS is working to modernise "localised legacy infrastructure", said Mark Gray. Credit: PA

The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) has completed a refresh of its client computing estate and is now working on modernising its datacentre infrastructure, its director of digital transformation has revealed.

Mark Gray joined CPS a year ago, following 10 years working in the private sector for Deloitte and, latterly, Barclays. His remit at the prosecution agency is to drive a digitisation agenda.

This began, he told PublicTechnology, with replacing the roughly half of employees’ PCs that were in need of an upgrade.

“We have replaced the devices used by around 50% of our colleagues to [install] new machines,” he said. “We have also established a principle of rolling refreshes.”

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Gray added: “Almost everybody in the organisation is on a laptop, and we have got remote-access technology that enables people to work from anywhere – our remote-access capability is better than anything I have encountered in the private sector. We are enabling increased smarter working.”

Work is continuing, meanwhile, on a refresh of CPS’ datacentre computing estate. Ageing server and storage kit is being swapped out, and the organisation is increasingly embracing cloud computing, Gray said.

“We have lots of localised legacy infrastructure, and we are investing in modernising that,” he added. “We are making good progress and we will be moving an increasing amount of services to cloud-based platforms.”

When asked about the potential security implications of an agency such as CPS processing data in the cloud, Gray said that the agency treats each individual piece of information on its own merits.

“We take a balanced risk engagement,” he said. “We have different types of risk data that we hold. We have lots of data that's extremely sensitive, but some that isn’t.

“We judge each piece of data – we are starting to use public cloud for some things, but we will also use private cloud, and our own private datacentres.”

Our full interview with Mark Gray, including lots more about CPS’ digital transformation agenda, will appear on PublicTechnology in the coming days