Bladewatch.com

Out-law

In its Digital Britain report the Government said that it wanted the public sector to reap the benefits of scalable, speed of provisioning and flexible pricing that it says cloud computing can bring.

While it consults with an IT trade body the Government has told all departments to make sure that all IT procurement from now on is compatible with cloud computing.

“All those Government bodies likely to procure ICT services should look to do so on a scaleable, cloud basis such that other public bodies can benefit from the new capability,” said the Digital Britain report.

Cloud computing is the use of massive central computing resources for IT work, with more modest computers connected to servers by networks. With the increasing ubiquity of broadband internet access cloud computing has become increasingly widespread.

The Digital Britain report outlined the phenomenon as has been observed in the consumer world. “The ‘public’ cloud  – where services can run on any server anywhere in the world – has attracted attention from industry commentators,” it said. “Achieving it, would be a first around the world for Digital Britain.”

It is not the report’s recommendation, though, that the Government run its business over public cloud networks.
“There are issues of meeting governmental needs for data location, security, data recovery, availability and reliability [with cloud computing],” it said.

The Government’s Chief Information Officer (CIO) and CIO Council has consulted with high tech industry trade body Intellect and has commissioned a strategy study to investigate the use of cloud computing in Government, which will be called a ‘G-Cloud’.

An interesting article talking about government ICT moving towards cloud computing, it will be interesting to see what elements of the IT infrastructure could be moved to a cloud platform, if like the enterprise there are any issues relating to data security or ownership. I wonder if the public sector should not be mixing cloud with commoditization of the platform, could we not adopt the simple practices of stripping down the component pc or interface to what’s needed? Upgrading and getting off those legacy platforms, lower the marginal operating cost for now and move on to cloud?

As with the enterprise my familiar phrase “STABILIZE THE CORE”, reduce the complexity of the infrastructure, look at ways to reduce operating costs and reduce fault calls, which might simply involve upgrading the desktops, rebuilding them or looking at a particular problematic application or element of the desktop support chain.  We can immediately look at service and cost transformation in this part of the IT infrastructure and then move on to cloud, to next generation applications and services, but we need to understand each unique business line, operating unit’s requirements and transform them.

Related to this, is there any reason that there isn’t a government wide email or exchange platform, where we only have one platform, one set of infrastructure cross departments (excluding sensitive areas), could we not have like in the enterprise a nhs active directory forest hosted once with users and areas hanging off that? We need less duplication of effort, less emotion, a commoditized infrastructure as a service, but I wonder if the way we operate budgets, the way we do government is compatible with this.

But I wonder at the same time, if this work should not be undertaken by the public sector within it, in small scale projects with some people from the private sector to get the right balance of making a platform that works within the standards of the public sector whilst offering a different viewpoint or possibilities for delivery? I wonder also if we should not be looking at having fewer more skilled teams running the infrastructure? Looking at outsourcing where appropriate?

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