I know that the UK government is committed to an aggressive transformational agenda, with many different facets from a technology and management perspective. Nor do I believe cloud computing will be a silver bullet solving many of the technology management challenges that government department CIOs have to deal with.
As we said in our research, cloud computing is just an alternative sourcing model, which will coexist alongside make, buy, open-source, share & co-develop. What I have noticed in multiple client inquiries is that attention has shifted toward off-premise, on-demand approaches as a way to decrease cost and increase flexbility. Of course there will still be internal deployments where the use of open source solutions or components (either directy or through system integrators) will be an option: in this respect the UK open source policy is quite well structured to help departments deal with the most important questions.

In the Government Private Cloud, it will be a mixed economy. We have no choice as the European procurement law for the Public Sector limits our ability to specify brand or product – the vendors select the best product to fulfil the requirements. However we believe there is more flexibility around open source as by definition there is less of a procurement issue (open to all) and the creation of the app store creates visibility ( a key constraint of many software vendors) as well as a provisioning model which will ease implementation. European procurement lawyers your advice would be warmly welcomed on this!

But look at it this way. If we have created an infrastructure as a service, and a platform as a service (or multiple) and we have software as a service as well as an app store, this is likely to play to both the SME market as well as the open source market.

Often a constraint for some suppliers in these markets is the ability to provide scalability, robust infrastructures, security mechanisms as well as limited resources to market, sell and service etc. G-Cloud will have to “wrap” all applications in technology to protect the rest of the environment, provide test environments, and provide provisioning models etc. As G-Cloud will be IaaS and PaaS and SaaS purchase decisions will begin to focus on greatest capability (in all contexts) for the lowest price made available to the end consumer in the shortest time. There is no reason why open source will not shine in this environment.

To confirm open source, open standards, reuse, standardised desktop models, Green IT, G-Cloud (with an app store), rationalised networks and data centres, Professionalisation of IT enabled business change, shared services, supplier management, information assurance and security, technical standards and architecture and reducing driving through efficiency etc etc etc are all still on our agenda.

John

As Peter Nikolov of 3tera pointed out the other day ( http://www.netevents.tv/video/cxo-perspective-peter-nickolov-3tera ), this is a new paradigm and we are just starting to seeing this new technology take off.

However, the cloud there is a lot of marketing bullshit around the cloud as well. The cloud as you point of outsources technical knowledge. This is important, because proper production cloud infrastructure can be even more complex than traditional infrastructure and it can grow and change quickly as well. Ironically, achieving zero single points of failure in the cloud are just as hard, if not more techincally complex than achieving zero SPFs in physical infrastructure. That is if one sees the cloud provider as a single point of failure, which because most, they are just that, geographical single point of failure complex platforms.

In the past when we saw a failure effect one site, now we will see a failure effect a cloud and multiple sites. Therefore, you need full production appliications on 2 clouds, fully replicated full stack applications in two different clouds? Even though your entire stack on the cloud maybe have full redundancy, you cannot ensure that the cloud will have the same.

The cloud has just taken a number of little failures that happen often and sunk them all into a system where they happen less. However, the clouds will break as well at some point. They already have, Amazon’s EC2 presence in Europe was taken offline during to a ligthning strike.

Clouds are not going to go away soon, it is unlikely that any of things will stop or slow the rampant growth of the cloud concept as it makes sense. This is due to the fact that they make sense to support our informational growth. Fast scaling,”unlimited storage” and scalable bandwidth, instantly. The driver behind the cloud is not business based. Although it does have positive points for business. The has increase in demand for scale and instant on and growth is what is driving the cloud. It is driven by infromational evolutionary, in age where all data has value and is increasing in volume at an increasing rate.

However all the marketing and hype is not saying there could be difficulties ahead.

The cloud is a good business model and due to complexity and their different languages, they are going to be racking in money as we move our ever increasingly infrastructural and data storage demands onto them. We then get charged per GB to store our ever increasing data, per byte of transfer it when it is accessed and per CPU hour to analysis and work with it.

In old world ISPs we used to use the term customer stickiness (and still do), e.g. how much pain is it for someone to move to another ISP taking into account all their mail addresses, hosting, dialup connectivity configuration, etc. I think customer stickiness has just been reinvented in the clouds.

However, it is here to stay so we better get used to the new complexities that it brings with it.

Onward to the agnostic cloud and then the single cloud, where all our own laptops and desktop machines are partly added to a distributed infrastuructural cloud, Boinc’ing, MapReduc’ing and P2P’ing the entire Internet as we start utilising the hardware which is in use more optimally.

We do live in interesting times.