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them contracting the task out to an IT company, who would then "develop" an inferior copy of their own cloud that is out-of-date by the time it is delivered, at massively inflated prices and ongoing maintenance costs.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