A national Cloud Computing strategy will play a significant part in delivering £1.4 billion of savings over the next four years, according to Minister for the Cabinet Office Francis Maude.
Maude today launched a detailed plan for the implementation of the Government’s new ICT Strategy which he promises could deliver such savings plus help deliver better public services digitally.
The Strategic Implementation plan – essentially, the detail ‘how we’ll do it’ of the ‘why’ of an earlier document released in March - sets out how the vision in the ICT strategy will be translated into real outcomes. Maude and his team claim this will make a real difference for:
- citizens, by delivering better public services digitally
- government Departments, by directly supporting them to live within their budget settlements by improving the efficiency and quality of our ICT
- businesses, by creating a fairer, open and competitive government ICT marketplace that removes barriers to SME participation and supports innovative and agile ICT solutions.
Maude said:
The plan at www.cabinetoffice.gov.uk includes specific delivery dates for each aspect of the strategy and an overview of how the strategy will be implemented with further details for each of the 19 delivery areas. And it will be followed in the coming weeks by four “sub-strategies,” says the Cabinet Office, which will detail the commitment being made on key elements of the ICT strategy, including Cloud Computing.
For its part, the Cloud strategy is expected to deliver savings of £20 million by 2013, £40 million in 2014 and £120 million in the 2014-2015 period.
The devil’s in the detail of course and we don’t get that until next week it seems, but the high level objectives for Cloud are:
- Reduce government ICT running costs and power consumption through radically increasing re-use of assets and services including software and hardware, thus „greening‟ ICT provision and saving both the direct additional costs of duplicate buying, as well as the indirect costs of running multiple redundant procurements
- Optimise use of data centre infrastructure - which traditionally has been hugely inefficient
- Maximising utilisation to allow rationalisation and consolidation of the data centre estate and lead to significant cost savings increase public sector agility through moving towards consuming ICT as a utility – where services can be supplied on a pay as you go basis, scaled up or down according to need.
- This will also allow the quicker implementation of government policies create a fairer and more competitive marketplace by a standards based cloud environment that enables a range of service providers constantly improving the quality and value of the solutions they offer, from small SME organisations providing niche products to large scale hosting and computer server capacity.
There will also be a Government Applications Store to deliver an online portal for public sector organisations to “readily source, share and promote certified ICT solutions”. Initial Apps Store services will launch in March next year with a view to having 50 accredited offerings in it by Christmas 2012. By the end of 2015, the aim is to have 50% of central government department new ICT spending to be on “public Cloud Computing services”.
The man who’s going to be responsible for making this happen is Andy Nelson, CIO at the Ministry of Justice. He’ll have to tackle the main risks to success that the Cabinet Office has identified:
- culture change to accept a commodity computing approach
- willingness of suppliers to engage with the new strategy
- inflexibility of existing procurement processes
To tackle these, different workstreams led and delivered by different government departments and public bodies – known collectively as The Foundation Delivery Partners (FDPs) – will ensure that departments and public bodies are fully involved in agreement of plans for the initial solutions being developed while a specific communications and engagement work stream is intended to ensure all departments are involved in the strategy.
On the supplier front, the good news is that A Cloud Services Group has been established and will work in partnership with FDPs to improve prospects of engagement. On the down side for suppliers, the Cabinet Office says it is ready to terminate existing contracts if necessary – in other words, play nice or you might not get to play at all.
Next week’s detailed Cloud-specific documentation will of course cast greater light on the strategy, but for now Dr Katy Ring of K2 Advisory commented:
Ring also highlighted the commitment that by December 2015 50% of central government new ICT spending will be transitioned to public Cloud Computing services:
