Are the government's plans for the G-Cloud unravelling?

Some industry watchers have argued that with other cloud services available the G-Cloud is unnecessary

Some industry watchers have questioned whether the departure of government CIO, John Suffolk, announced this week, would disrupt the G-Cloud initiative, unveiled in early summer. Suffolk was one of the driving forces behind the strategy.

And some public sector workers are already expressing doubts about the need for an independent government cloud.

The move towards cloud-based IT delivery may offer a compelling vision of value-for-money IT provision. Indeed, research from systems builder Fujitsu released this week indicated that, on average, firms can expect cloud computing projects to be 24 per cent cheaper than traditional projects.

But do we need a G-Cloud? David Wilde, chief information officer at the City of Westminster has his doubts.

"[At Westminster] we already use some cloud services and our ICT strategy is to be infrastructure-free by 2015. We are about 60 per cent there already and on track to beat the 100 per cent mark within about a year," he told Computing.

"That said, I make a distinction between cloud and G-Cloud. I don't subscribe to a government version of the cloud. Why have two or more when private clouds are perfectly adequate for sensitive data and public cloud services are fine for transactional activity?" added Wilde.

Others argue that G-Cloud remains the best way to reduce public sector IT costs, as applications delivered via G-Cloud are likely to become standardised, bringing economies of scale.

Whenever an individual government department or local council buys software that they run in-house, there is the temptation to customise it, says John Manley, a director at HP Labs in the UK. "Over the years that customisation adds significantly to the cost of running IT operations. It is much easier - and cheaper - to maintain, update and change a standardised system," he said. "Over the long term, the G-Cloud is likely to encourage standardisation of services."

Wilde agrees that there's no need to customise software at a local level. "Interestingly, local government tends to buy from a small pool of suppliers that build profit margins from customisation where perhaps it isn't necessary," he said.

HP Labs this week unveiled its G-Cloud testbed system - known as G-Cloud Theatre - which provides demonstrations for public sector IT professionals showing how a G-Cloud system would work in practice. The system shows how services could be built out of various hosted components and provides a management interface for those services.