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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."
The problem is that those corporations end up lobbying that very same government and don't actually end up competing in a truly free market.
It's entirely possible to have an internal cloud. The Government Cloud Department could be charged with managing all processing resources, availability, data storage, etc. as needed. The road-managing people need to run a simulation for a new traffic light's effects? Ask the GCD for a half-dozen CPUs for 6 hours. The bean counters need to count many hills of beans? Ask for 1000 CPUs for 2 hours. Don't know how long something will take? Send in the job anyway, and you'll get a call when it's done. From the perspective of all the other departments, they're dealing with this nebulous system that just does what they need.
Having one single Cloud Department means idle servers can be eliminated, redundant employees can be cut, and redundant mistakes aren't as likely to be made. Yes, security's still an issue, but not something that can't be resolved with the liberal application of encryption and security checks.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
> 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?