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."

Comments

Cloud Services Means Outsourcing IT

[TheSpoom]

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.

Re:Cloud Services Means Outsourcing IT

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Cloud Services Means Outsourcing IT

[Sarten-X]

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.

If only it were true

[Mathinker]

> A government should be thinking long term pretty much all the time.

So this means they should review all of their procurement policies which

• lock them into using a single vendor, and
• cause them to create documents in formats which only a single vendor can reliably read (and even that without any guarantee that newer versions of software from that vendor will display the document exactly like the version used to create it).

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?

Re:If only it were true

[devent]

That doesn't make any sense at all, you just throw in some buzz-words like "ownership, security, responsibility, reaction time". You comment reads like from some marketing department of Microsoft.

Governments can do open source, and they should all the time. Because there is no sound reason against open source for governments. If anything else, open source should be the philosophy behind a democratic government, which is paid by the people, works for the people and accumulates data from the people for the people.

The problem is always the neo-liberals with their free-market dogma. Don't support local economy, but make open bidding where all international heavyweights and convicted monopolies like Microsoft can bid. Don't write software and support your own I.T. department but outsource it to some cloud.

What the government should do is write open source software, so that every department can use the software for free and have the ability to modify the software for their needs. The government should biased for local software companies and disadvantage international cooperations like Microsoft, because that would foster the local economy and create know-how. The government should have their own I.T. departments because of the sensible nature of the citizens data and national security. And last, it should use open standards where possible and create new open standards where no such standards exists, because of the importance and the need for durability of the citizens data.

Re:The cloud has always been a cloudy concept to m

[fahrbot-bot]

Seems like the UK government has been building castles in the sky, maybe?

Reminds me of a Rita Rudner joke: "Neurotics build castles in the sky, psychotics live in them. My mother cleans them."

Re:Cloud computing was always a vapid subject

[jellomizer]

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.

Re:The cloud has always been a cloudy concept to m

[jhoegl]

A distributed, redundant system IS "the cloud".
So they probably realized they already had one.