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UK Government Ditches Cloud Concept, Consolidates Data Centers
twoheadedboy writes "HP's UK managing director says the Government has ditched its cloud computing project. A brainchild of the Labour Government and announced last year, the G-Cloud (Government Cloud) was supposed to bring significant savings. The HP guy says the government now has other ideas about how to save money on IT."
Seems like the UK government has been building castles in the sky, maybe?
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A great way to save money would be to stop cancelling projects a year after they are initiated in favour of yet another thing you'll probably ditch in a few years.
Wow! Really? That would be a first.
One idea shower and the data comes back down to earth.
A bunch if Bureaucrats realized their budgets would shrink an astonishing amount if they go to the "cloud" - so they opt for "consolidation" which will never happen because everyone in charge of their little fiefdoms won't give up power (and money)
In other words, the government has no clue what it is doing, except that it has a budget it needs to spend to justify its existence.
This is why people don't have any faith on our government. They haven't even had a chance to deploy "the cloud" project fully until they change to the next great thing, which won't be fully deployed before it gets yanked for some other "new" technology fad that comes along.
The worst part, we can't fire these idiots.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
What would the civil servants in charge of procurement do then? They'd be out of a job and we can't have that!
An organization as big as a national government should have its own IT department. Using cloud services basically means you're outsourcing your IT to the company providing the cloud services. For a government, this is not a good idea. They store all sorts of sensitive information about their citizens, to which the cloud provider would ultimately have access (and Dropbox proves this happens regardless of what they say, as for a large part they need it to diagnose issues with their service). Mission critical applications, of which a government would have at least a few, would also have a single point of failure if hosted on a cloud provider.
Ultimately it's about short term cost savings versus long term problems. A government should be thinking long term pretty much all the time.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
...they stop allowing themselves to get milked to death by over charging contractors.
Honestly it's a farce, I've worked for the DVLA and I know just how ridiculous it all is.
> A government should be thinking long term pretty much all the time.
So this means they should review all of their procurement policies which
It seems to me that thinking long term should give a great advantage to the idea of using open source and a document format like ODF.
Unfortunately, there's the other side of the long term. If governments go FOSS, over the long term the politicians will get a lot less payback from lobbyists, no?
Ah, the good old days of Slashdot in the 1990s when thin clients were the future, the desktop was dying, Java was the answer, and kernel 2.3 was finally going to bring Linux to the desktop.
Cloud computing makes sense when an organisation is not big enough to justify having it's own datacenter(s) with dedicate personel and procurement and/or has wildly variable computer processing needs.
In that situation, by using cloud computing the organisation will save some money because it shares in the benefits that the cloud computing provider has from economies of scale.
However, if an organisation has big enough, reasonably stable computing power needs, it should already benefit from economies of scale (by having their own datacenters), in which case going for cloud computing would be more expensive (since it would then be sharing the savings from economies of scale with the cloud computing provider instead of capturing all of those savings)
So, for example, while it might make sense for the UK Census (which happens every 10 years) to rent computing power for number-crunching, it makes no sense for the HMRC (tax department) to do so.
This doesn't even go into the issues of vendor lock-in, data protection and increased reliance on external networking links.
It's nice of HP to tell us what government policy is...... I would imagine HP were a little scared that the government would get off the hardware upgrade treadmill a little too much if did too much cloud computing.
Reminds me of a Rita Rudner joke: "Neurotics build castles in the sky, psychotics live in them. My mother cleans them."
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Maybe they didn't want to be accused of having their heads stuck in the clouds.
Oh wait...
It can still be a cloud, its just that that cloud is owned by the government. The datacenter can be a 'local cloud' with all of the benefits of a cloud, while having all data stored in a government datacenter (you know where your data is, you know how secure the site is, you get what you pay for, and rolling security/data updates is all in one place). You could even use google apps on local machines to create documents, just redirect the save to the government datacenter. Say, doesn't this 'apps on the server, not on the client' stuff look a whole lot like mainframes pushing to really really thin clients (ok, dumb terminals), in the 1950's?
A distributed, redundant system IS "the cloud".
So they probably realized they already had one.
We must centralize everything that is decentralized, and decentralize everything that is centralized!
And we must hire consultants to make sure the reorganization is done efficiently.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
The industry is a beast, it drives policy thru special interest groups. Once we realize how much we could SAVE by leveraging FOSS, it would be all over.
Sorry Monopoly players, its time has come. Remember when Refrigerators changed the Ice-Delivery-for-refrigeration paradigm? Its baaaack in a big way.
'UPDATED A Cabinet Office spokesperson has responded to Wilson's comments, telling IT PRO the Government was committed to cloud computing, but without mentioning the 'G-Cloud' title specifically`.
"Any inference that Government has ‘ditched’ the cloud computing programme is wrong," the spokesperson said.
'Despite assurances the Government was taking cloud seriously, there was no mention of the G-Cloud initiative. The spokesperson said the Government was committed to cloud computing and delivery of the "next version" of the its cloud strategy`.
"The Cabinet Office had not responded to a request for clarification over whether "the cloud programme" was in fact the G-Cloud project outlined by Labour last year, or a different initiative altogether when we posted this update".
From what I gather - the cloud is generally thought of as being a "not so good thing" due to privacy concerns with hosted data. The upside is supposedly decent uptime due to its distributed nature (unless you're Amazon last month).
And consolidating a data center is a "not so good thing" due to...well, being consolidated. "One disaster to ruin them all" as it were. The upside is potentially having less overhead costs with your operations.
So what I don't get - why not just turn their distributed data centers into a gov-operated "cloud"? Sure you wont get lesser costs due to still requiring the same man power but you do get the redundant and geographically independent nature of the cloud system instead of 30 different systems all over the damned place?
Lastly - am I the only one not impressed with this huge push for moving every damned thing to "The Cloud"? Seems like we're adding another layer of bureaucratic complexity by requiring that you work with yet another outside vendor for your services.
More or less all major UK government IT projects start as the baby of some politician who's idea of getting things done is to demand it, shove it through then hope it mostly just comes together in the end.
Obviously, this doesn't work for a major IT project which really does have to be properly specced from the beginning. It then fails for all the predictable reasons, but the politician will not abandon it as it would be an admission of failure. There's less fuss to waste another (and another) £20m than confess to having already wasted £100m so it drags on until a new party is elected, which then dumps any progress, pays off the contractor and claims that lessons have been learned.
At which point begins an all-new clusterfuck with all the same failures.