Q&A: AGIMO's John Sheridan on data centre strategy
- 08 July, 2011 11:01
First Assistant Secretary of the Australian Government Information Management Office (AGIMO), John Sheridan.
A year on from the introduction of a 15-year data centre strategy, James Hutchinson sits down with the First Assistant Secretary of the Australian Government Information Management Office (AGIMO), John Sheridan, to discuss the strategy’s progress and future
Related coverage: Management guide: Data centre migration
Computerworld (CW): How far has AGIMO advanced with the whole-of-government data centre strategy?
John Sheridan (JS): The strategy, of course, was launched complete, as it were. We didn’t launch a strategy in progress; what we launched was a strategy which contained in it a range of approaches and there are a range of activities that flow from the strategy.
There are five activities we’re running at the moment. The tender for data centre facilities is in place now and people can use the panel right away. Then there are the facilities tenders for what we call the fit-out category; for essentially people who have buildings that can be used as data centres and need to fit them out.
Obviously, there’s a slightly longer time frame for that. Then there are greenfield facilities, which are essentially people proposing to build a data centre in a particular place and again the time frames are a bit longer for those things. Those three are progressing very well; we’re getting very close to announcing where we are with those so I’ve been very pleased with how they’ve come along. The next tender is migration services — the use of vendors to move people between data centres when they need to do that. I think there are about eight services that fall under migration — things such as procurement, program management, commissioning, decommissioning, those sorts of things. We’ll be in negotiation with preferred vendors soon.
The next one is data centre-as-a-service and we’ve had that discussion paper out on the Web since late February. We’re getting some comments back on that and some people voting on the arrangements that are there.
We’ve had a couple of contacts from industry players who’ve told us they are definitely going to send us something or provide more comments. Then we’ve got a couple more activities down the track as we look at examining whether or not we should build a whole-of-government data centre and also starting to take into account the Cloud arrangements and what we should do about that.
We’ve had a very full 12 months or so progressing these things. At the same time the interim panel for data centres has been working well and agencies have been making good use of that, so we’re actually quite pleased with the progress here.
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CW: How has the data centre space changed since the 2008 review into government ICT spending by Sir Peter Gershon and what effect has this had on AGIMO?
JS: We were doing some of this work before Sir Peter wrote his report but we’ve certainly coalesced as a consequence of that [report], with the aim of avoiding $1 billion worth of costs. We know that the interim panel that we put out as a consequence of that work gave us particularly good savings in the leasing area by aggregating demand and we’ve been quite happy with that.
That’s been consistent with the other whole-of-government activities we’ve seen in the ICT procurement space, which largely has shown us that we can get savings in the sort of 20 to 30 per cent by aggregating government demand in this area. What we’re also seeing, as we expected to occur, is the market looking for solutions. We’ve seen work in a whole range of places around improved offerings from data centre providers which Sir Peter predicted would happen. It’s just a matter of making sure the government takes advantages of those.
CW: Have there been any policy or other obstacles to implementing that strategy?
JS: I think it’s important to remember the public service generally and the ICT community, particularly in the public service, work together on these things to get the right sort of outcome. It’s not like AGIMO is somehow forced to push out on its own; we work in a very close relationship with a range of other agencies in this regard. We work very closely with large agencies but we also have regular meetings with smaller agencies.
We have steering groups that progress these whole-of-government activities. It’s not so much overcoming obstacles as progressing together to get the outcome that government wants.
CW: Given the pace of developments within the data centre industry and government departments over the past year, is there any threat of the 15-year strategy becoming outdated or out of line with government requirements?
I don’t believe so. Like all of our co-ordinated procurement arrangements, we don’t intend to create some sort of train smash effect or be a break on progress in these areas. Where agencies have a requirement to progress things faster than the timeframe of the whole-of-government activity, they’re allowed to apply for and generally given permission to do so.
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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.
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CW: Are we likely to see the data centre strategy evolve to suit the Cloud strategy’s progress?
JS: I think these are parallel strategies; they work together. There’s a degree of convergence but I don’t see them by any means as mutually exclusive or as diverging.
CW: AGIMO has recently embraced social media through blogs and Twitter. Do you believe this has changed the way government engages with industry in progressing these strategies?
JS: The government policy was very clear on this when it made its policy of open government in July last year.
Encouraging this sort of discussion between public servants and other stakeholders, encouraging openness in the way the government did its work and certainly AGIMO’s role as the lead agency for the implementation of the government’s response on Government 2.0 matters means we’re very keen to progress these issues. What we’re seeing increasingly is open discussion about this and there’s been a range of examples where we’ve had quite energetic discussions about things, so we’re happy to be doing what the government wants us to do and we’d be happy to get the sorts of results that the government is seeking here.