Smarter, cheaper, greener’ is the underpinning strategy of ICT provision in the modern public sector. A significant strand of Lord Carter’s ‘Digital Britain’ report relates to the provision of G-Cloud (government’s virtual public services network) and G-AS (an application store to facilitate business application re-use), pillars of ‘future state’ Cloud enabled public sector services. The vision is bold – arguably a world first – and is set against a backdrop of widespread fiscal temperance. There is an urgency to leverage G-Cloud’s benefits, which is predicted as a key enabler in a £3.2bn per annum efficiency saving as outlined by the Operational Efficiency Programme. Prudence demands a robust business case and risk managed implementation. Re-use, agility, increased competition and market levelling, energy use reduction, innovation in commercial models and contractual vehicles, procurement simplification (and others) are quantifiable and important facets.
http://www.publicservice.co.uk/feature_story.asp?id=14413
‘Cloud outages’ have occasionally blighted public implementations and will be unacceptable. Government will play a central role in driving maturity of the Cloud space. Interoperability standards, best practices, design patterns and, importantly, security principles all require close private sector engagement.