back to article UK government's cloud spending hits saturation: Love of Microsoft endures

Growth in spending on cloud by certain sectors of the UK government looks to be coming to a juddering halt, according to information provided under Freedom of Information (FoI) and open data. And contrary to the rest of the world, where Amazon’s AWS is number one, it is Microsoft’s Azure that’s the market-share leader with UK …

  1. tony2heads

    Cloud themselves

    Surely the UK government with all the HMRC, NHS and other stuff would be big enough to run their own cloud.

    Or is that a stupid idea?

    1. Steve Davies 3 Silver badge
      Mushroom

      Re: Cloud themselves

      It isn't a stupid idea. It is one full of common sense and therein lies the problem. Governments the world over are distrustful of common sense and much prefer the 'snake oil' aka Data Nirvana as promised by MS.

      I'm sure this won't end well (see Icon)

      1. BugabooSue

        Re: Cloud themselves

        Ahh, I agree that idea would be “common sense”’ but I think you are missing a major point here -

        *if* they were to set up their own cloud services, who would they blame when it all goes TITSUP?

        Themselves???!!

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Cloud themselves

        It's a good idea in theory. Except that the public sector would inevitably cock it up by imposing layers of bureaucracy, indecision, indirection, remuneration based on soft factors like seniority & how many meetings you attend rather than data points on how much you deliver. Etc etc. The entire culture is - mostly - the opposite of what's needed to efficiently build technology at scale. Anon because I know.

        A more practical idea might be to treat the IT as a commodity that can be relatively easily swapped out when a better or cheaper provider comes along. That's much more easily done when planned for up front during system design. Some people in the public sector even understand and do this, though an awful lot don't.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Cloud themselves

      "And contrary to the rest of the world, where Amazon’s AWS is number one"

      Azure is growing much faster though. As this article makes clear, everyone and their dog is moving to Azure these days.

    3. Just Enough

      Re: Cloud themselves

      Yes, it's a stupid idea.

      The UK government "running their own cloud" would simply mean them contracting the task out to an IT company, who would then "develop" an inferior copy of their own cloud that is out-of-date by the time it is delivered, at massively inflated prices and ongoing maintenance costs.

      Far better to simply use an account with a cloud provider like everyone else.

    4. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Cloud themselves

      You mean like nearly every other country in Europe?

      WHY on earth would we do that when we can just buy any old public cloud service?

      Crazy talk that is...

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    £751,000 on Office 365

    If we assume NHS Digital employs 2833 people (figure from their website) does this mean they're spending £265/yr per employee on Office 365?

    That doesn't seem like a very good deal. I hope they're getting some really important features for that price.

    1. Korev Silver badge

      Re: £751,000 on Office 365

      They probably have some contractors too.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: £751,000 on Office 365

      They might have e5 licenses. They are about £370 per user per year at list price, you get every feature they have on offer with 365 and a full phone system. Still very expensive though. I much prefer the usability of G Suite.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: £751,000 on Office 365

        GSuite is far from usable. Its easier to setup but not usable.

        No one in finance wants to use Google Sheets as its shit. Google Docs regularly fucks up docs it tries to convert. Share that Google Doc with the world and oh, they require a Google account to fucking read it.

        Office is established enough almost everyone will have office to open the word doc you send them. If not, they can simple use Libre Office.

        Used GSuite for 3 years, its far from usable. For a small business its fine, for medium to large, don't bother.

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: £751,000 on Office 365

        "Still very expensive though. I much prefer the usability of G Suite."

        The closest Microsoft package to G suite enterprise is E3 which is cheaper and has numerous additional features. I prefer a fully featured office package that isn't a cut down browser app, has secure offline DRM file formats, and still works when the internet doesnt.

      3. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: £751,000 on Office 365

        >>I much prefer the usability of G Suite.

        You prefer the vastly inferior feature set and lack of integration and compatibility of Borg Apps? You must use it for next to nothing more than email and a notepad.

    3. steviebuk Silver badge

      Re: £751,000 on Office 365

      Have you taken into account local gov, charities and central gov get discounts on the listed prices?

    4. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: £751,000 on Office 365

      "£265/yr per employee on Office 365?"

      Thats about right for E5.

    5. ExampleOne

      Re: £751,000 on Office 365

      How many of those accounts are using MS Project or MS Visio?

      Either of which would trivially pad the per user cost and would not be broken out of the O365 billing line.

    6. Smoking Gun

      Re: £751,000 on Office 365

      Enterprise E5 SKU why not?

      About £30 per user per month for Microsoft 365 (Windows 10, EMS, Office 365 E3), £360 per year.

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Fantasy FOI

    Is that really what they said? And you believed them?

    Sounds quite different from what I've heard about who is doing what where and how.

  4. Twanky

    UK government's cloud spending hits saturation

    Once all Gov IT is in the cloud then it will run at maintenance level costs. However, given that HMRC (the Customs bit in particular) have no idea what to plan to deliver in 3 years time (and really should not be blamed for that) I suspect that the plateau in spending is due to uncertainty not saturation.

    What would be more useful would be an historical analysis of how overall Gov IT spending has been increasing and whether the cloud components were taking a share of the usual spend or appearing as additional spending or even contributing to a slower increase (I very much doubt this last idea).

  5. Twanky

    Love of Microsoft endures

    I seem to recall that UK Gov recommended or mandated (or something) that national and local government offices should adopt ODF standards for 'electronic' documents. I've been failing to find evidence of this (either a report in the media or a statement from my local government bods) - or did I just dream it?

    Just caught the edit window: https://www.gov.uk/guidance/open-document-format-odf-guidance-for-uk-government

    1. a handle

      Re: Love of Microsoft endures

      Microsoft's 10 year obligation with the EU to Support ODF ends in a couple of years. Whilst this is in effect, the UK gov were wise to use this opportunity to state that suppliers such as MS "must" Support ODF, so hopefully it will be supported longer. Other govs should to do this. This is so important in the history of computing.

      Google should push ODF too, but they don't, it's too late for Google now. Microsoft's varying transitional "Docx" formats win. Microsoft will ensure no one will ever work with Microsoft's file formats reliably unless they pay a license.

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Where are these "clouds" hosted and the disaster recovery sites and, as I presume MS and AWS are US Corporations, how will they avoid sending all information to American 3 letter agencies?

    I assume that all of the above have multiple "clouds" in the UK for and that the US Gov 3 letter agencies will have no recourse to any of this information, but my assumptions have got me in trouble in the past.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      I know that at least some public sector things running in Azure use sites in both the UK and EU for redundancy. The EU one could get interesting in 2019, at which point I suppose London and Cardiff become the options.

      How well that defends against the TLAs depends on your level of paranoia I guess. Are you absolutely sure they haven't compromised that router model used in all the data centres? What about your SSH encryption algorithm?

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    I think someone at Kent County Council is telling porkies.

    Kent have around 10,000 employees licenced for Office 365 E5.

    Kent County Council have purchased the "Microsoft Cloud Navigator" programme where they move production "workloads" to Azure. They also have a dev environment in Azure. £18k a month maybe, not a year.

  8. andypowe11

    Drawing any conclusions from G-Cloud sales data is difficult at the best of times for a number of reasons:

    1) Spend numbers are largely 'self-reported'

    2) Because of 1, reporting tends to lag reality such that reported sales in any given month tends to go up over time (i.e. recent months' spending tends to be under reported)

    3) Reported sales of AWS and Azure may or may not reliably include sales via re-sellers and partners

    4) Comparing sales of Microsoft (i.e. Azure and Office 365) against sales of AWS makes no real sense since you are not comparing like with like - if you could split out just Azure spend, then that would be a reasonable comparison with AWS spend - but I suspect that isn't possible for some of the reasons above.

    As to, "why doesn't the UK gov build its own cloud?". Ha! Can you imagine. If cloud was simply a place to run VMs that might just about be a possibility. But if you think that is what cloud is, I suggest you go and look at what the likes of AWS, Azure and Google actually offer these days. There isn't a cat in hells chance of government producing anything in the same ball-park... not even on the same planet.

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