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,
Phil Dawson, chief executive at Skyscape Cloud Services, told UKA Live editor, Helen Olsen (left), that his company could not have operated at all in the government marketplace if it had not been for G-Cloud. "One of the challenges has been historically how do you get into this marketplace, which has been locked up by a few."
The old processes had involved filling out forms that were "300 pages long, with 200 pages trying to guess what termination issues would be", Dawson said. By contrast, the G-Cloud framework was easy to understand and set out clearer, simpler rules. "Compared with any traditional public sector procurement process ... It's a breeze."
The old methods kept out smaller players because they favoured financial scale, he said. But this did not always offer security: "there are lots of examples where big balance sheet companies crash and burn very quickly, so what risk are you actually mitigating?" Suppliers in the past had to show evidence of previous examples of where they had sold their service to government, "which almost by definition [ruled out] innovation," said Dawson.
Bill McCluggage, EMCIt is not all plain sailing, however. Bill McCluggage (right), former deputy government chief information officer and now chief public sector technologist at supplier EMC, said security that barriers are still hampering progress with Cloudstore. "The biggest failure at the moment is that we've got 3,185 services on G-Cloud... [and] it is taking nine months to pan-government accredit 11-12 services", he said.
"I would like to see not a catch-up process but a leading process to say we can deal with this. G-Cloud has had a new commercial approach, a new economic approach - now there needs to be a new accreditation approach."
Denise McDonagh, G-CloudMcDonagh (left) acknowledged this was an issue, but said not all services on the G-Cloud would need security accreditation, and there was learning to be done by suppliers too in preparing their products for accreditation.
She also said there may be some level of individual negotiation over data security, even where services are bought through the cloud. "We have always said pan-government accreditation will get you to a point, but at the end of the day it's the senior information risk owner in an organisation that can accept [a solution]."
Phil Dawson, SkyscapeDawson (right) was not convinced: "From a supplier point of view, we can't have different opinions... we have to have a common view of what accreditation means."
Live online audience polls carried out during the debate found out that while few people (around 8%) were poised to move all their services into the cloud, nearly 70% said they intended to use G-Cloud at least for limited pilots in the next year.
The polls also found that fewer than a quarter of respondents felt that half of all government IT spend would be in the cloud by 2015 - a stated intention of the government's digital strategy.
Bill McCluggage - one of the authors of this target, during his time in government - was sanguine: "You shoot for the moon, and at least you get into orbit."
And Denise McDonagh, now responsible for delivering the target, remained optimistic: "I still believe as... people become more aware of the savings that can be made, that more and more people will move [into the cloud]. I have this theory that it's a kind of a hockey stick round the wrong way; that we will go along and all of a sudden it will just take off."
Earlier in the debate, McDonagh had asserted: "I firmly believe a pound spent in the cloud is worth 8-10 with existing methods".
She acknowledged that "Billions that are currently spent in IT are spent in large outsourcing contracts... [and]will be baked in there for the next few years", but added, "It's about making sure we identify new spend and making sure that new spend is spent properly."
Accordingly, G-Cloud is running 'buy camps' to train purchasers on moving services into the cloud, showing people both how to make savings and how use of the cloud can improve services to the customer. Above all, cloud services are much quicker and more flexible to use than traditional procurement methods, she said.
"One of the challenges I have in the Home office is I can't do things as quickly as I want to," McDonagh said. Recently, however, she had used G-Cloud to buy instant use of software she had only needed for three months. "I went in, bought of it, and disposed of it when I didn't need it. We need to be a little bit bolder - I need to challenge my peers about what we can achieve.
"That for me is what will drive the demand to this new way of thinking. In my own department, everything we do now is challenged, and I say we're going to do this in a different way."
Bill McCluggage said that there were reports coming back from G-Cloud users saying that it now takes three or four days to purchase IT systems it previously would have taken three or four months - or three or four years - to buy, and that this ease of purchase was key to letting cloud computing gain a foothold in public bodies that are slow to embrace change.
"You can try something small, and persuade the nay-sayers in your organisations. They'll say 'Wow, you've been able to give me this, and it's taken three weeks'. It can help persuade them IT is a value-adder, and not just a cost to the business."
Not everyone is convinced that cloud services always offer great value, however. During the broadcast, one listener cited an experience he had whereby a software price quoted through G-Cloud had turned out to be more expensive than a similar service procured through traditional routes.
McCluggage said that sometimes a commoditised pricing might be higher because different elements were packaged together, like a package holiday - you might find you could get each element cheaper elsewhere, but you would have to put in a lot of work yourself to do so.
"When you do it in a commoditised way, you may find you pay more than if you go to a service at the application layer or infrastructure, but the choice is there now and it's transparent."
And if you do find you are being overcharged, he had a simple response: challenge the supplier, and "name and shame".
Denise McDonagh admitted she had herself come across at least one other case of questionable charging, had approached the supplier, and received assurances they were going to change the price. And, she pointed out, with the G-Cloud system, as one price was fixed for all customers, once they do change it, it will be a fairer price for all, unlike the old days when everyone had to haggle on their own.
In response to another audience question about the reliability of cloud services - described by the listener as a "leap of faith", requiring reliable web connectivity everywhere - Bill McLuggage injected a note of rueful realism about the past.
"The first thing I would say is never ever think that the old way, where you were connected to a WAN locally, it didn't fail. I have bitter experience as the CIO in the Northern Ireland civil service of a timeline when a complete network servicing 20,000 people went off the air. That was bad news for me personally."
The answer is to prioritise your applications, for each looking at desirable levels of "CIA - confidentiality, integrity and availability", and deciding whether cloud services will be good enough.
"Things do fail, and they do stop, but the world is a digital space now, and as it becomes more digital there is more resilience, more capability. So I would say yes look at it, but look at it in the round."
Denise McDonagh agreed there are issues about different levels of security and resilience being appropriate for different applications, and said that making sure different services such as cloud and legacy systems could be integrated onto user devices could be a concern. But she added that it was already the case that users accessed some secure systems and some web services.
Overall, McDonagh said, she was so convinced of the power of the G-Cloud's online purchasing model that she would like it to be extended to a generic 'Govstore' for all kinds of IT products and services.
"What we want to do in the centre is do things well and do things once. So if have we have a mechanism for buying cloud services, why not use it for other services? We will continue to iterate Cloudstore, because it is my ambition that cloud store actually becomes Govstore... for ICT."
View the full debate now on-demand
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Autor(en)/Author(s): Dan Jellinek
Quelle/Source: UKauthorITy, 09.12.2012
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