G-Cloud sales pass £1bn after huge £87m spend in March

Public sector's appetite for cloud and digital services continues to grow

Total G-Cloud sales reached £1.141bn, rising a sizable £87m after a bumper month of sales in March.

The Cabinet Office has provided no indication on what fuelled this spike in sales, as normal G-Cloud spending is usually between £40m to £50m a month.

However, the recent launch of a new Digital Marketplace framework is likely to have helped to boost the government's and wider public sector's appetite for cloud services.

Breaking no trends, however, is the spending split through the government's cloud procurement framework. Some 52 per cent of the total sales by value and 62 per cent by volume were awarded to SMEs, much the same as February's figures.

Also following previous trends is the split in spending between Whitehall and the rest of the public sector. Central government accounts for 76 per cent of the total, compared with the wider public sector's 24 per cent.

The Cabinet Office also appears to have completely abandoned updating its G-Cloud dashboard that provides a breakdown of the types of cloud services the government has bought.

Computing has quizzed the Cabinet Office and Government Digital Services (GDS) on this but has yet to receive a clear answer as to why this is the case.

As such, we have no real idea whether the government is spending taxpayers' money on full cloud platform and infrastructure services that can significantly overhaul the disparate IT infrastructures in Whitehall, or on less transformative consultancy to plan how and where it can best adopt the cloud.

GDS' mission is to ensure that the government adopts modern IT services and becomes ‘digital by default', so it could be argued that the adoption of cloud-based infrastructure, rather than auxiliary IT services, should be a primary concern.

Sales made through the government's Digital Services framework rose by £4.7m in March to £54.7m. Eighty-five per cent of that spending was made by central government and 15 per cent by the wider public sector.

Organisations such as NHS trusts want to procure more digital services to boost IT efficiency, and such spikes in sales on the Digital Marketplace as a whole are likely to keep occurring in 2016.