IfG.CC -
Institute for eGovernment

At the time, PASC was chiding the government for its slow progress in bringing about the ICT Strategic Implementation Plan, which is intended to complement the Government ICT Strategy published in March 2011. Together, these two plans outline the government’s “longer term programmes of reform to improve Government ICT and deliver greater savings.”

Cloud computing and virtualisation will help UK CIOs cope with a drop of almost seven per cent in IT budgets in 2011, according to a survey of tech chiefs worldwide.

The UK IT spending forecast compares unfavourably with the rest of the world, the Gartner 2011 CIO Agenda survey of 2,014 CIOs found. Globally, tech budgets are expected to rise by an average of one per cent.

It opted for the Windows Server 2008 R2 operating system with Hyper-V technology and the Microsoft System Center suite for server virtualisation to support the move to the cloud.

The IoM government says that the new systems have increased data availability by up to eight times, boosted storage utilisation by 40 per cent with no additional hardware and reduced operating costs by 15 per cent.

CloudStore offers the public sector a cheaper, quicker and more transparent way to procure the services they need, including email, word processing, system hosting, enterprise resource planning, electronic records management, customer relationship management or office productivity applications.

In a live panel debate on the project's new second phase - G-Cloud ii - Denise McDonagh, G-Cloud programme director and ICT director at the Home Office, said that more than 450 new suppliers are now offering cloud software, infrastructure and platform services to government through the store. Most of these are small to medium-sized businesses including many one-man bands,

The CloudStore opened on Sunday after a deadline for submissions had to be extended twice in the face of interest, much of which came from SMEs according to Cabinet Office officials.

Rigby is also chair of the government's green ICT delivery unit (GDU), a cross-departmental, pan-public sector body charged with driving both efficiencies and savings from public-sector IT.

"The GDU is all about pulling together the policy for government around green ICT. We are also there to share knowledge," said Rigby. The GDU was responsible for developing the 'Greening Government' ICT strategy, which is linked to the government's cloud strategy, end-user devices and capability strategies.

Phil Dawson, chief executive of Skyscape Cloud Services, said that the G-Cloud programme was "delivering significant cost savings" to the public sector, according to a report by Outsourcer Eye. Skyscrape provides hosting services for the Government's web portal, .gov.uk, and also provides a platform for services offered by the Disclosure and Barring Service to help businesses check whether prospective employees are suitable to work with vulnerable groups.

The figure includes the cost of setting up and maintaining the CloudStore G-Cloud app store, Maude said in response to written questions by Labour MP Michael Dugher on Monday. No information was available from the Cabinet Office at the time of writing about the length of time the costs figures covered.

Maude said that government datacentre numbers would be published in the ICT Strategy annual update report, which is "due shortly".

The service, which launched in February 2012, has seen gradual uptake across the UK. But according to Nelson, key changes are on the horizon to improve the service's useability.

Speaking to an audience of IT leaders at yesterday's Westminster Cloud Computing eForum, Nelson said: "What we'd love to be able to do with this is be in a world where it's more like an app store, where it works on multiple devices, and has an online catalogue that's just there all the time, and where you can find ratings. We're not there yet."

The site is set to offer a faster route for the public sector procurement of IT services, including system hosting, electronic records management and office productivity applications.

Public Sector organisations will be able to buy “off-the-shelf” IT services from CloudStore on a pay-as-you-go basis, rather than having to develop their own systems.

Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude revealed the government's expected savings from the G-Cloud project for the first time in response to a question posed by Labour MP Michael Dugher in the House of Commons.

Maude also revealed that the cost of the G-Cloud framework, and the associated CloudStore, had cost £4.93m to implement.

Some 257 suppliers offering approximately 1,700 services were signed to the first G-Cloud framework, which were made available from February through the government's online portal, dubbed Cloudstore. Over 50 percent of these suppliers were SMEs.

However, the G-Cloud teams' plan is to continuously reissue the G-Cloud framework in the hope that it keeps pace with changes in technology and as a result provide the most current as-a-service products to the public sector.

The government has launched its CloudStore, kicking off the G-Cloud strategy which aims to create a competitive marketplace for cloud-delivered services that are pre-approved for public-sector bodies.

The marketplace, officially launched on Sunday morning, was built by UK company Solidsoft, a choice intended to reinforce the government’s message that G-Cloud will help smaller businesses compete with large, established companies for government customers.

The service, which the government says is still in its pilot phase, is currently little more than a list of approved suppliers and services.

While this is certainly helpful for public-sector organisations looking to procure IT services, it falls some way short of being the ‘appstore' that many, the government included, are calling it.

The pilot E-Health Cloud scheme is being run with help from cloud computing company Flexiant, which has worked with the university and hospital on integrating the e-health service. It is hoped that the platform can be used to replace the ageing systems that are currently in place, in order to provide a cohesive source of patient care information.

If successful, the project will raise questions about the need for costly dedicated IT infrastructure developments elsewhere in the NHS. However it is also likely to provoke new concerns about electronic health records' privacy and confidentiality.

A London hospital is to begin storing patient data using “cloud” technology.

The new NHS pilot project, where records are kept on the internet rather than on computers in individual hospitals or GP surgeries, could pave the way for all patient data to be stored online rather than on paper. Patients using the system would have control over who is permitted to access their data and could use it to invite specialist doctors to view their results.

The Hospital plans to employ a private Cloud version of the ‘E-Health Cloud’, but a demonstrator version will also go live on Scottish provider’s Extility public Cloud platform next month and is being billed as the first large-scale deployment of such an offering in an e-health context.

Researchers at Chelsea and Westminster are working in conjunction with Edinburgh Napier University to establish whether the system could realistically be used to replace current paper-based systems.

A senior IT professional from the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) has become the latest high profile civil servant to give its backing to the Government’s G-Cloud project.

Writing on the Government blog, Adrian Scaife, IT Account Manager at the MoJ, said using cloud computing was a ‘no-brainer’ thanks to all the benefits it provides.