At the SmartGov Live conference this week John Stubley, programme director for the recently re-named Public Services Network at the Cabinet Office, provided an update on PSN. The name was changed from Public Sector Network to convey the fact that PSN is meant to be the infrastructure via which public services can be delivered, rather than a single public sector network such as GSI.
Stubley claims that PSN is the most mature of all the layers in the Government ICT Strategy. It is built on a reference architecture to enable some standardisation upon which different service delivery models can be created by different suppliers, and there is a PSN accreditaiton process to ensure that government solutions can be reused across organisations and that there is an element of plug-and-play between solutions. Part of this accreditation process involves joining a common authentication programme to create a shared security compliance model.
Currently there many variants of Government Connect being used within the UK public sector, so, for example, GSI is the main connection standard for central government in England and Wales, GCSX is the main connection standard for Local Authorities, while GSX is the main connection standard in Scotland. Supporting these different variants is not the most efficient way to manage network connectivity for the UK and so, as the contract comes to an end later this year, we are moving to the Government Convergence Network (GCN).
The Government has signed Deeds of Understanding with four network service providers to create GCN – these are Virgin Media and Global Crossing (who will both be PSN accredited within the next few weeks according to Stubley) as well as BT and C&W (whose accreditation will follow later this year.) Accreditation is currently up to IL2 level of classification for data, but IL3 services are being added to the accreditation process. The suppliers are building their PSN models on the understanding that they get commercial returns for the services that run across it. In this way each network supplier can provide services for multiple authorities and agencies by creating solutions to serve multiple government buyers.
The components of these services can be pre-approved as part of the PSN accreditation process. In other words, a framework is being developed for PSN to enable shared buying, so that the suppliers can build solutions once and sell many times. The Public Services Network Agency (PSNA) will be operational from August to deal with issues between suppliers regarding accreditation, open standard compliance etc.
The first instantiation of PSN is in existence now undergoing its final user tests at Kent County Council and will be shared by Hampshire, with the Home Office also using the network for the Borders Agency in Dover and Portsmouth. There are many central government and local authority organisations beginning the transition process to PSN – early central government adopters include The National Policing Improvement Agency, the MoJ, and HMRC (as well as Home Office Borders Agency.) At Local Authority level, as well as the pioneers in Kent and Hampshire, Staffordshire, Westminster, Dorset and Cambridgeshire are among those planning adoption. The educational network JANET is also migrating to PSN.
All of which suggests that momentum is now building around PSN, but this message needs to be promoted more agressively within the UK public sector. For example, Chris Pope, director of transformation at Merton Council, speaking at the same conference, commented that Merton has ploughed on with developing its own private Cloud because it didn’t believe PSN will be delivered, and feels that, “Cloud development is outstripping PSN availability.”
Possibly the PSNA will be able to get the message out more clearly among buyers, otherwise this first experiment will backfire in persuading suppliers to build solutions on the understanding that UK public sector buyers will then come. And that could have unfortunate consequences for other Government plans for Cloud service delivery.
