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

A need for data delineation comes out of a well-established drought of local facilities from the global Cloud players, one many CIOs, both public and private, believe is preventing them from adopting an ‘all-in’ mentality to Cloud.

Though the likes of Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Salesforce offer the lucrative chance to rent storage, computing and software, they often do so from the confines of Singapore and Hong Kong, areas in which those dictated by strict data laws simply aren’t willing to tread.

Frost & Sullivan’s Chandrasekaran suggests it is a double-edged sword; governments must play their part to lure the global players on-shore, in order to ultimately benefit from the services they provide.

This article is part two of a two-part series on government use of Cloud computing. Click here for part one.

Cloud computing strategy guide: Moving your enterprise to the cloud.

“What has been in favour of Australia is definitely the demand, the fact that Australia is always seen as one of the early adopters of new technology,” he says. “But in terms of creating a great connectivity infrastructure from a broadband standpoint, Australia faces significant competition from Singapore and Hong Kong.”

Yet demand alone is not enough for the Australian Cloud market.

As di Maio is quick to point out, even with a $4.3 billion wallet, the Australian Government is a drop in the ocean compared to Washington and the governments of other major world players. Faced with that conundrum, Australian governments have already made their decision: Under the right circumstances, the Cloud is a go.

That was a game. This is paintball

Despite all the talk of public and private Clouds, government action is yet to move beyond proofs of concept; toe-in-the-water experiences at best.

What has become cemented in the minds of department IT heads, however, is the concept of a ‘community Cloud’, or what has become known more colloquially in public circles as the ‘G-Cloud’: By pooling their resources together major government departments can consolidate infrastructure, minimise where possible and take turns to scale their computing as required at peak demand times of the year.

“The way our virtualisation is progressing we should be easily able to share capacity across agencies, responding to periods of high demand,” says Department of Human Services deputy secretary of IT infrastructure, John Wadeson.

“We are building an infrastructure which has many of the attributes of Cloud computing; highly virtualised, large capacity.”

Much of Wadeson’s attention in recent months has been focussed on pooling the infrastructure of at least two major government departs — Medicare and Centrelink — under a $374 million project announced in this year’s budget that is expected to see the staff of both sides of the fence share management systems and data centres.

The pool has grown ever wider as smaller social service agencies clamour to prop their bits and bytes up with the larger budget of Wadeson’s agency.

But the pool is one of several Human Services could be involved in if the ‘G-Cloud’ does eventuate locally; a community arrangement more like an aquatic centre than an individual pool itself.

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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.