Government seeks silver lining in the cloud

As we suggested in January’s print issue of VitAL magazine, following leaks late last year of its radical IT plans, the Government has published its wide-ranging IT report outlining the ways in which it intends to save billions per year (perhaps as much as £3.2 billion a year from an annual bill of at least £16 billion) by adopting various IT practices and technologies.

The internal cloud computing strategy, known as the G-Cloud, as outlined by the Cabinet Office minister Angela Smith, will include the concentration of computing power into 10 – 12 highly secure data centres, each costing up to £250m, which will replace more than 500 presently used by central government, police forces and local authorities. For obvious reasons, MI5 and MI6 will keep their data centres separate.

‘Open source’ software is another major part of the initiative with plans for licence-free systems like Linux to be used more widely among central and local government’s four million desktop computers. This could be a major blow for the current operating system front-runner in the public sector, Microsoft’s Windows, but operating systems licenses are a major expense and a cost saving of just £100 per machine would total £400m across government, although clearly a certain amount of training in the use of new unfamiliar systems would have to be implemented. But by 2015, 80 percent of central government desktops could be supplied through a shared utility service, a cloud service like Google Docs, which allows the creation of documents online for free.

Taking a leaf out of Apple chief executive Steve Job’s book, the government plans to build its own app store, like the highly successful Apple version, known as the Government Applications Store or G-AS for short. Part of theits remit would be to help solve problems, by re-using programs that have been written elsewhere and can be re-applied. The report says that there needs to be a greater reliance on sharing best practice and exporting IT solutions that succeed in one part of the massive organisation to all the other areas that could possibly benefit from a similar approach.

A unified communications approach to telecoms has also been mooted, where a Public Sector Network or PSN, with converged voice and data and extensive use of VoIP technology will replace existing outmoded private branch exchange technology without massive capital expenditure.