The G-Cloud remains as nebulous as ever

While attending a Westminster eForum event on cloud computing last month, I had the pleasure of listening to Martin Bellamy, a Ministry of Justice executive, give an interesting talk on the current status of the G-Cloud. I had half given up on the idea of the government ever mentioning the term again, given that it was left out of its latest ICT strategy, but Bellamy went out of his way to insist that the G-Cloud is still “alive and kicking”.

Alive and kicking might be slightly optimistic, but he did say that he anticipates that the government will adopt a cloud-first strategy, similar to that of the US.

What I found most interesting about Bellamy’s presentation was his assurance that the government would be embracing public cloud wherever and whenever it could. I can definitely see this happening at a software level, where the use of Google Apps or similar cloud-based products wouldn’t be too difficult, but beyond that, it is unlikely. It just won’t happen at an infrastructure level.

I spoke to a partner at Deloitte recently who explained to me that he had been working with a major pharmaceutical company that was weighing up the pros and cons of moving their infrastructure into either a public or private cloud.

After carrying out the usual risk analysis, the pharmaceutical company came to the conclusion that public cloud just isn’t worth it. Once it had considered resilience levels and data protection complexities, the low cost point didn’t really factor when compared with a highly virtualised, super resilient, very customisable private cloud.

Now, if a major pharmaceutical company cannot bring itself to take the plunge into the public cloud, how can the government expect to make use of it at an infrastructure level? I hardly blame them for this, but I am just struggling to get an idea of what this all encompassing G-Cloud is going to look like.

Talking about a government cloud at a software, platform and infrastructure level is exciting stuff, but it seems that those in charge just don’t know how to get away from the cumbersome legacy systems that are in place. Bellamy himself said that some government systems are 40 years old and there are tens of thousands of unique business applications to consider.

This is not something for the faint-hearted and I wonder whether MPs and government leaders have the foresight to pursue it with some vigour. A government cloud delivery strategy is due to be published this month – let’s hope that we aren’t again left wondering whether or not G-Cloud is a thing of the past, and we start to see some action being taken to create a better IT architecture for government.