Government Cloud: Fad or lofty ideal? (Part 2)

Investigating the 'G-Cloud'

By offering its own infrastructure, and sharing that of the Australian Tax Office or Health, savings could be realised without the Cloud vendor as middle man.

Yet Wadeson says he wouldn’t see that much benefit for his own department of such an approach.

“The Human Services Portfolio has critical mass both in terms of economies of scale, and the technical resources to exploit the technologies that underpin Cloud Services,” Wadeson says, pointing to the Cloud-like features such as resource pooling and rapid elasticity that already provide many of the benefits of the service model to the department’s efforts.

These came in handy during the Queensland floods in January this year, when Wadeson estimates a record 225,000 people attempted to access the Centrelink website on a single day. Total traffic across the month more than doubled on average over the same period in 2010.

It is those spikes that create the demand for elasticity — one that the Cloud can offer but when that Human Services already has, and one that it has looked to pass onto other departments when not in peak use.

Yet a community Cloud arrangement, without the vendor, can become simply another exercise in shared services, according to di Maio.

“There have to be agreements across government to use a

government-run or government-mandated service,” he says. “Will people agree, will agencies be willing to use these central services, would they rather use an external service?”

Subdued Clouds

Despite all the hype, di Maio doesn’t think governments are quite ready to jump in head-first. “The most strategic thing we have seen across the board is email,” he says. “Everybody is looking into it, but not for stuff that is truly strategic at this point in time.”

Cloud is unlikely to hit its stride, di Maio says, until the core and high-risk applications like ERP make their way from the internal data rooms to a massive data centre hosted elsewhere. That might happen from the vendor’s side, but there are few indications governments are likely to co-operate anytime soon.

“It may never make sense for many core bespoke applications to be delivered under a public Cloud service model,” Wadeson says. “I can say with some certainty that I will be retired well before Government public Cloud services are mainstream.”

Until then, the Australian Government’s strategy paper is likely to become what Sir Peter Gershon’s recommendations have been for the vast majority of government ICT. For Wadeson and his cohorts, it will provide the ultimate barrier against the vendor hype and re-badging that floods Cloud discussions.

Join the newsletter!

Or

Sign up to gain exclusive access to email subscriptions, event invitations, competitions, giveaways, and much more.

Membership is free, and your security and privacy remain protected. View our privacy policy before signing up.

Error: Please check your email address.

Tags cloud computing

More about Amazon Web ServicesCentrelinkFrost & Sullivan (Aust)GoogleMicrosoft

Show Comments
[]