Government Cloud and Open Standards
On Wednesday, January 27th 2010, the UK Government announced its new ICT Strategy for meeting the requirements of the citizen, both in delivering services for the next decade, as well as meeting the requirements to reduce public spending through consolidation and sharing services and capacity. At the heart of the strategy is a commitment to implement a Government Cloud or G-Cloud comprising a shared infrastructure and an Applications Store with which to gain access to IT services, whether automated or human, for civil servants. The vision is to encourage more effective use of resources, starting with a pilot implementation of Infrastructure as a Service, followed by Data Centre consolidation and the development and deployment of shared services across government. This can result in a substantial reduction of costs, through removing duplication of services and resources, a reduction in energy costs and a consequent reduction in carbon footprint. This is by no means the only example of a government initiative on Cloud adoption, the US led the way starting a year ago with its Federal Cloud Computing Initiative, which comprises a similar drive to offer Infrastructure as a Service and a Storefront to allow access to shared services. The Canadian, Australian and Japanese Governments are also looking at their own offerings too.One of the key drivers in the G-Cloud and FCCI initiatives is the development and adoption of open standards for cloud service providers encouraging the possibility of interoperability. Bob Marcus and Craig Lee, OGF, are collaborating with others, see cloud-standards.org, to help bring focus on this important process. This will be discussed at two forthcoming events in Europe:- 1) CloudScape II being held in Brussels on February 22nd and 23rd; and 2) OGF 28 being held in Munich on March 15th to 19th. There is a lot of work to do and recent developments within the OGF with the OCCI group are beginning to surface some key areas of understanding for promoting utility computing. All in all, I believe we are witnessing a significant shift towards shared infrastuctures supporting shared services and, somewhat unusually, the governments of the world are well equipped to motivate some of this innovation and thus improve services while reducing costs. Bring it on!
Labels: Cloud computing, government IT. cloud standards
posted by Ian Osborne, Grid Man Now! @ 10:09 AM
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