'Any council that says it can't do cloud hasn't done its homework,' claims Peterborough City Council's Richard Godfrey

'No one pays their council tax so that I can employ someone to patch a server,' says Godfrey

Local authority CIOs that cite "data governance" objections as a reason for eschewing public cloud "haven't done their homework", advises Peterborough City Council's Richard Godfrey, assistant director of Digital Peterborough.

Responding to an audience question at Computing's Data Centre and Infrastructure Summit 2015 today, Godfrey explained how the council is shifting much of its IT into the cloud in order to break down old data silos and to enable IT specialists to work more closely with end-users in departments.

"How do you deal with data governance? Very carefully is how you deal with it," said Godfrey.

He continued: "Don't ignore it. Make sure you do your background work. Understand what data you're going to put where. Understand why you are going to do that. If you need additional tools to sit on top of Amazon in order to encrypt or hold the data, then evaluate those.

"EU data protection law allows you to put and process your data anywhere in the EU. Safe harbour is a bit of a get-out clause if you wanted to use an American data centre. But, again, you have to... look at the risks and know what the risks are. We put in place as much mitigation as we believe we need to cover those risks," he said.

Much local authority data, he added, is neither personal, nor sensitive. Local authorities considering a shift to the cloud should therefore identify and risk assess the systems and data that could be personal and/or highly sensitive, he advised.

"Anyone who says 'we can't do cloud' hasn't done the homework because data about potholes in the roads, for example, can go anywhere; with public health data, we have to spend much longer working out what that data is and what it looks like.

"It's about applying the right risk assessment to the work, but then revisiting it every few months."

There are hundreds of providers, he added, that work with the public cloud companies like Amazon that can provide additional tools that can help with that. "I would just throw everything into the cloud very quickly, but my governance team won't let me, although it was the governance team that rolled out Box for us. I started an IT project and passed it over to the governance team, and they're now driving that into all of the departments," said Godfrey.

Godfrey has talked to Computing a number of times in the past about his council's cloud plans, a project that it is midway through. And Godfrey updated Computing about the project earlier this month, in advance of today's summit.

The ultimate aim, said Godfrey, is that Peterborough City Council should own and run the minimum of hardware and software, so that IT staff can be pushed out to departments to enable them to make the most of the systems.

"No one pays their council tax so that I can employ someone to patch a server. They pay their council tax so that we can deliver services back to residents," said Godfrey.