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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."
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
"Out of a cannon. Into the sun."
> 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?
or they realized there was lots of risk with the cloud and they did not want their resources to disappear and have little way to get them back on line other than yelling at a vendor. If anything the Amazon EC2 outage showed is that you should have a backup or a local resource for when the cloud fails. If you have to do that anyway then it is not as good as people are trying to make it out to be and the same or more work.
or they realized there was lots of risk with the cloud and they did not want their resources to disappear and have little way to get them back on line other than yelling at a vendor.
Nobody realizes that yet. NOBODY. At least, nobody in a position where these decisions are made. It's a scary fact, true, but sadly true.
If anything the Amazon EC2 outage showed is that you should have a backup or a local resource for when the cloud fails. If you have to do that anyway then it is not as good as people are trying to make it out to be and the same or more work.
The problem being that the people that makes these decisions have absolutely no clue what a computer is. They don't realize that a server is basically the same thing that lies on their desktop and they watch youtube on - if a little more beefy. They don't know squat. They just know that Amazon will look good (or bad) in the press for the next election.
They don't give a rat's ass about their data because they don't have the slightest idea of how valuable they are, and don't have the slightest idea how quickly they can vanish forever. So why bother? Let's grab a bottle of Whiskey, a glass, and lie down next to the swimming pool with an iPad2 to shut our brain off. All these worries will be no more in a few minutes.
Write boring code, not shiny code!
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. . . .
I thought that Amazon would be more reliable than even a system that I was maintaining myself, until that outage. They must have multiple engineers, redundant servers and connections, insane amounts of bandwidth, etc.. it's weird that it would go down at all when you have that much money and resources to throw at it, barring someone hacking the system.
which is totally what she said
Not necessarily, for a very simple reason.
The bigger a system is, the more complicated it gets, the more places there are for things to go wrong. And when they go wrong... oh boy.
It doesn't get a great deal bigger or more complicated than Amazon's EC2. Presenting an entire datacentre to the enduser as a big unified blob of computer power you can spin up virtual machines in is distinctly non-trivial.
Cloud Computing isn't always cheaper. It is a matter of size and scale. Cloud computing is best for small - mid sized organizations. Where the cost of infrastructure and keeping a server(s) to run is more expensive then a Cloud computing company to host many Uber Servers and give you a slice to use. But these companies make money off of this... Why because the cost of selling you 10% of use on their server you pay 15% (still cheaper then getting your infrastructural and keep it running successfully) However if you are getting big and you use 100% of their server infrastructure then it is clear that you should probably setup your own data center as your size and the amount you are paying will be cheaper to host it yourself.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
A distributed, redundant system IS "the cloud".
So they probably realized they already had one.
That was not the UK govt's plan, though. They already run their own datacenters, and they were planning to use scalability technologies ("cloud") to consolidate them.
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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!
Because UK governments of both Labour and Conservative have a long history of handing over large sums of money to incompetent corporations to create nonsensical spaghetti out of their IT requirements. That will not stop until people that know something about IT are in charge of the purchasing, or in other words, never.