Nine in 10 local councils have made no G-Cloud procurements

Survey by Six Degrees group suggests G-Cloud struggling for momentum outside Whitehall

Almost 90 per cent of UK councils and local authorities haven't made a procurement using the government's G-Cloud service, and more than three-quarters don't know what they'd actually use it for.

That's according to figures from a newly released study by data services provided Six Degrees Group, which points to little adoption of cloud services by public sector organisations outside of central government.

G-Cloud was established to help government organisations - both at a local and a national level - purchase cloud services from a wide range of service providers in the most cost effective manner possible.

The network now hosts more than 1,000 suppliers, but a survey of over 300 councils suggests that the vast majority of local authorities aren't using the service, with just 38 having made procurements from the cloud.

That figure means 87 per cent of local authorities haven't been made any purchases using the service, while just 24 per cent have indentified reasons why G-Cloud contracts would be procured. Those include migration of Windows 7, hosting services, major application replacement and the likes of WAN, LAN, server and communications services.

The research points to 76 per cent of local authorities having no knowledge or interest in what G-Cloud could be used for, demonstrating a gap in attitudes between local authorities and Whitehall.

"These statistics show that there is a communication issue from central government. Cloud services have the potential to be revolutionary for the public sector and G-Cloud is a framework specifically intended to make sourcing these services simple," said Campbell Williams, group strategy and marketing director at Six Degrees Group.

"However it's clearly not doing its job for a huge number of councils and local authorities in the UK, which could otherwise be benefiting from the expenditure savings, innovations, agility and security of cloud computing," he continued, before suggesting that if central government doesn't try to encourage local authorities to use G-Cloud, it could end up as an expensive failure.

"As a CESG accredited provider of IL2/3 cloud services, 6DG is committed to helping the public sector with cloud adoption and we're disappointed that G-Cloud is still failing both customers and suppliers alike," said Williams.

If those behind G-Cloud don't educate the public sector soon, government procurement for IT will continue to be handled by the same old faces delivering the same poor outcomes for the taxpayer," he concluded.

Earlier this month, Cabinet Office Minister Francis Maude hailed the advances made by government in the digital sector, suggesting that the UK has become a "world leader" in the field.