Photos: IT saving lives in Iraqi warzone

Lieutenant Colonel Jon Cole - IT saving lives in Iraqi warzones

Officers and soldiers have been winding down operations since the beginning of March this year. It’s a gradual, controlled process, and not everyone will be leaving this month.

There will be a small residual UK presence in Iraq, staying to train and support the Iraqi services.

“IS engineers are the first in, and the last out,” said Cogan. “But we are moving over 1400 vehicles from tanks to quad bikes, 5000 containers and have about 900 personnel out of 4200 left here. Clearly to carry out this sort of operation, often in challenging and dangerous situations, robust and effective communications and IT solutions are vital.”

As well as the physical equipment, information assets all need to be recorded, collected, returned to the UK or disposed off. Most of the military’s electronic information is held on five main systems, plus four smaller LANs.

All of this has to be processed and sent to the right people, and then the equipment has to have all potentially sensitive informatio