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Food Standards Agency completes cloud hosting shift

15/10/19

The Food Standards Agency (FSA) has moved all its hosting to cloud services with the closure of its last data centre.

The shift was announced by Julie Pierce, the FSA’s director of openness, data and digital. “We think the FSA is the first government body of similar scale and complexity to complete the switch and fully embrace cloud-first solutions,” she wrote in a blogpost on LinkedIn.

“The recent closure of our last data centre in York completes the FSA’s move away from on-premise server rooms and is an important final step for the agency’s Evolve-IT programme.”

Pierce said that the cloud services, provided by Microsoft and Amazon, cut costs and reduce vulnerability to power cuts, floods and other hazards. “Finally, we are providing our users with cost effective, quick to deploy, usable solutions to their business problems,” she added.

Earlier this year, Pierce told UKAuthority that one of the FSA’s biggest challenges was to pull together data from a wide range of sources collected in disparate ways. It has been developing a national digital system for registering food businesses, which aims to replace those run by individual local authorities.

The agency has also been piloting the use of blockchain technology to authenticate the source of food products.

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