CW: Is data centre-as-a-service the best strategy for providing data centres to smaller agencies or simply one possible option?
JS: It’s one of the options. There are always interesting ideas to be had here and one of the things I’m keen to get across to people is the government is really serious about getting industry participation in these arrangements.
We’ve gone to a lot of trouble to set up these principles of ICT engagement with industry; we want to work with industry associations, to get comments from them, and we want to make sure we put things in at the outset of our planning in these areas so that down the track we reap the benefits.
Most people will tell you in ICT projects that if you invest a little more at the outset, you get better arrangements at the end. So I’m very happy with the way that we’re proceeding with these consultations, in the hope that we’ll get not only good advice about how we might proceed with a particular idea but also the very strong possibility that we’ll be able to get ideas from industry or indeed other stakeholders that might suggest, “Here’s something you might want to consider doing instead or as well that might also get you good outcomes.”
CW: Are there any overlaps between the data centre and Cloud strategies you’ve overseen in past months?
JS: There’s synergies between those arrangements. Clearly, some things you can put in a data centre and some data centres can be like Clouds, and there’s a range of things that fit across there. We think, for example, there are probably things in data centres now that may well fit into public Cloud arrangements. People put their test and development environments in data centres now, and it may well be they can go into Cloud arrangements in the future.
Public-facing websites that are essentially designed for public use and don’t hold any in-confidence data or anything like that, may well be quite well suited for public Cloud arrangements rather than the data centre arrangements they have now.
As the Cloud strategy is released, I think we’ll see that there are a range of opportunities in these areas, that Cloud may well answer some of the data centre issues. Similarly, of course, the use of advanced virtualisation, which is the technology backbone of Cloud, can well be used in data centres to get better results.