Should the Government Develop the G-Cloud?

In the UK, we’re fairly well known for the amount of cloudy weather we have but it now seems we want more cloud – not only does it give us plenty of rain but apparently it also brings savings on a huge scale! Well that’s what the British government’s senior IT officers seem to think and they are relying on the Public Sector Network (PSN) and G-Cloud to help deliver some of the substantial £3.2 billion savings laid out in the Operational Efficiency Programme (OEP). So can the PSN and G-Cloud step up to the mark – Tom Brand, virtualisation lead at GlassHouse Technologies (UK) is not convinced.

The ‘ICT Strategy for Government’ suggests that over 1,000 data centres will have to be consolidated down to between 10-12; achievable only through huge levels of highly efficient consolidation and virtualisation. It will also mean that the vast number of government departments will have to start sharing services and infrastructure at all levels, requiring standardisation on a massive scale.

To date, centralisation and standardisation on a large scale doesn’t exactly have the best track record within the government and by the very nature of the shared infrastructure required this is unlikely to be a simple task. In commercial organisations it is easier to simply dictate strategies such as vendor selection and architectural blueprints to the entire organisation. However, across a diverse range of public sector bodies all with existing strategies and contractual obligations this is likely to involve another costly rationalisation exercise.

I’m a huge fan of cloud computing but it has to be approached correctly. Organisations that think they can treat moving to cloud computing as a simple P2V exercise need to think again. Moving existing systems ‘en mass’ to cloud IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) solutions requires huge levels of capital investment for planning, migration and the re-platforming of existing, often legacy, applications.

It also requires significant changes in operational process to align to the highly flexibly and dynamic nature of cloud computing. If the government is looking to save £3.2 billion pounds I’m not convinced they have factored in the possibility of a £1.5 billion expense to get there.