Government set to adopt US-style cloud-first policy

Ministry of Justice executive and member of the G-Cloud delivery board, Martin Bellamy, told delegates at a Westminster eForum yesterday that he anticipates that the UK government will adopt a cloud-first policy in the near future.

The government has come under criticism for putting cloud computing plans on the back burner after it failed to specifically mention the widely used term G-Cloud in its latest ICT Strategy Report, which was published earlier this year.

Bellamy denies that the government is ignoring opportunities within the cloud. "The vision for the G-Cloud still remains intact and there is increasing progress on delivery," said Bellamy, director of change and ICT, National Offender Management Service, Ministry of Justice.

"However, I think we need to recognise that ICT in government is something that has grown up over 20, 30, 40 years. When you have got an IT landscape that is that old and has thousands of unique business applications, it will take some time to completely refresh it – but the journey has started," he added.

"The Americans have adopted what they call a cloud first policy, and I anticipate that we will be doing something similar."

In November of last year the Obama administration announced that the US government would be adopting a cloud first policy, which would see a quarter of the its $80bn budget allocated to cloud computing.

Although Bellamy did not give any details as to when such a policy might be introduced in the UK, he did mention that the UK government's G-Cloud delivery strategy would be published next month, which should provide an indication of any imminent plans. "Saving is a pretty unified objective in government at the moment.

We are expecting to be able to demonstrate that moving to a cloud model is going to allow us to save substantial amounts of money, and the more we can show how big the savings are, the faster we can drive adoption," said Bellamy.

"Government also wants flexibility and freedom to change. At the moment traditional IT procurements have taken about two years to do and then we sign ourselves up to contracts of 10 years," he added.

"In the future we want the marketplace to be more dynamic, where we can buy up services with shorter duration commitments and if a better service comes along, we are able to switch to it."

Bellamy outlined to delegates that the government's G-Cloud will be made up of all three traditional cloud layers: infrastructure-, platform- and software-as-a-service.

This will include hosting services, the tool kits to develop applications and web-based applications that can be delivered end to end.

He also said that although cloud standards were important to government, he "doubted" that government would be developing new standards itself. "The name of the game is selecting the industry standards that best fit," explained Bellamy.

According to Bellamy, the government is using "foundation delivery partners", which are public sector projects that will provide best practices for the rest of the public sector to adopt similar methods. For example, Warwickshire County Council is in the first phase of deploying Google email and apps to 4,000 users.

"There is still a lot to do. The cultural change is substantial," said Bellamy. "However, in a period where the government needs to substantially reduce its costs, I would argue that there has never been a better time for government to make the shift."

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