G-Cloud

1st September 2011

When the Government announced its new IT strategy in March 2011, plans for the long awaited G-Cloud programme were noticeably absent. And perhaps through this single act alone, we have learnt more about the elusive plans for the much anticipated government cloud, than we have throughout the entire project so far. Questions must be raised as to why the Cabinet Office are refusing to publish its plans to the public. Indeed, does the lack of information from the Government hint at a desperate attempt to cover up the canning of yet another failed IT initiative?

Empty promises

When plans for the G-Cloud were first announced, aims for the programme were admirable to say the least. For instance, the Government had ambitious plans to reduce the number of independently-run data centres, from over 500 to just 12 highly secure and robust 'super data centres'. The Government also claimed that if the programme was managed successfully, it could easily deliver massive savings to the UK Exchequer, within the region of £3.2 billion per annum. And strengthening the green argument for Cloud computing, the Government argued that if virtualisation technologies were used effectively, the amount of equipment required could be reduced down to as little as 10% of the current provision.

Two years have passed since initial plans for the G-Cloud were first announced, yet it remains to be seen how much, if any, progress has so far been made. This is because there is a distinct lack of visibility of the plans – the Cabinet has insisted on such privacy – so even if progress is being made behind closed doors, how would we ever know?

Phase 2 of the scheme, running from October 2009 to July 2010, did involve input from 100 industry experts, but lo and behold, the meetings were closed, and we are therefore yet to see any results from these private debates. As part of the Government's new IT strategy, a summary of these results was due to be announced in March. The G-Cloud however, was noticeably absent from such plans, sparking rumours that the programme had been canned. Fiercely denying such a claim, the Cabinet Office now plans to make an announcement of the G-Cloud developments in September 2011, but whether that announcement will be made remains to be seen.

If public debate had been allowed, what kind of constructive criticisms would industry experts currently be offering the Cabinet?

Large scale plans without the necessary support

Whilst the promise of the G-Cloud is huge, the required time, effort and resource to bring such an idea to fruition are arguably more so. The Government has never seemingly been able to deliver projects of this scale on time, to budget, or even at all. Take the fledgling NHS e-records IT system for instance, which after nine years and £7bn, the Government is considering pulling the plug on.

Rather than rely on just a handful of the same suppliers time and time again, the Government should instead put out a number of different tenders, allowing conversations with major Cloud players, such as Amazon, Microsoft and Google to be entered into. Having built and managed IT infrastructure of a similar size to that required by the Government, these Cloud giants are perfectly positioned to offer insight into the G-Cloud proposals. And to get the required economy of scale, a large supplier such as those aforementioned above could be drafted in to build a public element to the G-Cloud, allowing non-business critical data and applications to be stored at relatively little cost.

No plans to invite SMEs to tender?

Whilst the G-Cloud plans were noticeably omitted from the IT strategy announced in March 2011, one point that the Government seemed keen to focus on was its pledge to involve more SME suppliers in procurement tendering processes. Indeed, the Government expressed a desire to encourage more innovation and SME participation in contracts, an initiative that it hoped would create a more competitive marketplace and thus drive economic growth.

As well as engage with its same few incumbent suppliers behind closed doors, and to whom contracts are traditionally handed over, the Government should also therefore deliver on its promise to invite more SMEs to tender. A hybrid Cloud solution would work in the G-Cloud's favour: non-business critical data could be handled by the Cloud giants for them to host in a public Cloud environment, whilst SMEs specialising in private Cloud solutions, could deliver private Cloud environments for all the Government's sensitive applications. For the private Cloud element of the G-Cloud, the Government would benefit from the security that data is ISO 27001 guaranteed, is stored only in UK locations (an absolute must for all Government data) and is comprehensively supported by full disaster recovery capabilities.

No proof of concept

Devising the G-Cloud plans in a closed fashion and delivering the programme as a fait accompli without any prior pilot projects is a recipe for disaster. Instead, taking one small governmental department, working out its requirements and then monitoring its solution on a handful of pilots from a few different SME suppliers, would provided an excellent proof of concept. Once proven, the successful pilot project could be rolled out to a much wider audience, increasing the likelihood of a successful programme overall. And such a trial stage would allow the Government to deliver on its pledge to involve more SMEs in the tendering process.

Without the necessary support and consultation from industry experts outside of the Cabinet's closed sessions there is a very real danger of the G-Cloud programme being delivered as a fait accompli, and most likely behind schedule and over budget. The G-Cloud is increasingly looking like it will go down in history as just another Government IT failure, but it can be saved.

So why the Cabinet is failing to take guidance from the experts, and on something which has the potential to impact on the IT industry and the UK economy so significantly, beggars belief!