Can the ‘cloud’ really provide for all of the government’s ICT needs? Tim Gibson reports on a round table convened to discuss how – and whether – the Cabinet Office’s ‘Cloud First’ policy could become a reality.
The world of government ICT is undergoing a dramatic process of transformation. Rather than relying on long-term contracts with major ICT providers, public sector bodies are now expected to adopt short-term contracts with a variety of suppliers, including an increasing number of SMEs. Meanwhile, government ICT specialists are also under pressure to stop purchasing assets such as servers and software licenses, and instead to buy in the ‘cloud’ – renting other people’s server space, computing power and software capabilities as and when required. These two agendas sit neatly together, with SMEs better able to compete against the big boys in a market built around online services rather than hardware sales.
So the government’s ICT professionals currently have their work cut out trying to keep up with the pace of change. But it’s not only technologists who need to get up to speed with the realities of 21st century computing: the whole civil service workforce – and particularly procurement specialists – will need to develop an appreciation of the opportunities and benefits associated with the cloud.
With this in mind, CSW teamed up with not-for-profit cloud specialist Eduserv to host a round table focusing on the Cabinet Office’s ‘Cloud First’ initiative, which insists that all departments and agencies should consider cloud-based services as their first option for ICT procurements. Each department is also expected to review its existing ICT provision to ascertain how their systems could be enhanced by cloud computing, and to draw up plans to transition their ICT portfolio to the cloud as soon as possible. Those who resist the move will have to produce a business case explaining why they’re sticking with a more traditional ICT model.
Blue sky thinking
The Cabinet Office is enforcing the Cloud First policy strongly: Eduserv’s government business development director, Andrew Hawkins, likened its tenacity to that of a Rottweiler. He knew of two government procurements, he said, which have been halted and refashioned to ensure compliance with the policy.
The Cabinet Office is clearly determined to ensure government reaps the potential benefits of cloud computing. Cloud services are usually cheaper than traditional ICT services – when ‘Cloud First’ was launched in May, the then-director of the G-Cloud programme, Denise McDonagh, said that off-the-shelf products bought in the cloud can be found as cheaply as 30% of the cost of bespoke systems. The CloudStore – the online trading platform from which government can procure cloud products – is also expected to reduce the procurement costs of buying ICT.
There is more that the Cabinet Office could do to streamline procurement, suggested Group Captain Q Dixon, deputy head of the office supporting the Ministry of Defence’s CIO. He said that if Cloud First is to be a success, then procuring from the CloudStore needs to be easier than procuring using traditional methods. One way to achieve this would be to simplify the Cabinet Office approvals process – which scrutinises all substantial government IT procurements – for purchases made through the cloud, thereby lightening the administrative burden for departments that follow the government’s IT strategy. “If you simplify the approvals significantly, linked to the ICT strategy, you’ve got a winner,” he suggested.
In response, Eduserv’s Hawkins said that some of the responsibility for driving the transition to the cloud lies with the supplier community. The cloud “is an opportunity for us,” he said, “but on the other hand, it makes things more complicated – for our customers and for us. [So we] have got to think about how we adapt and change to provide the services you need.”
As well as driving savings, the CloudStore helps the government pursue its SME procurement targets, said the Ministry of Justice’s chief technology officer Peter Scott. John Cundy, a senior IT auditor at the Home Office, agreed: rather than departments employing Systems Integrators (SIs) to manage their ICT provision, he argued, in future they’ll have to become their own SIs, “with SMEs putting lots of bits in” to the mix of an ICT solution.
One result of this agenda should be that government ICT becomes more flexible and responsive to changes in technology. After all, said Scott, Cloud First provides an opportunity to “break apart some of the deals-based IT procurement that has gone on, and has baked us into technology that is now far behind the curve.” He said that the seven-year timeframe of many pre-cloud government ICT contracts has been superceded by the use of shorter-term contracts, meaning that there is every opportunity for departments to update their technology to keep pace with the latest innovations.
Pie in the sky?
Despite the advantages associated with cloud-based computing, the transition to this new way of working poses difficulties. For a start, said Alistair Gilchrist, operations director at the Office of Rail Regulation, there is the issue of security in the cloud. This is much harder to guarantee than when a department stores data on its own servers, but its responsibility to guard that data remains undimmed. “The thing that gets in our way at the ORR,” he stated, “is the need to manage our [security] needs, and the costs this drives for us.”
The MoD’s Dixon agreed, and added another problem: the risk that suppliers may close cloud services. “We can’t have [the provider] turning it off because they’ve decided to move onto something else,” he said, “and we need to know that it meets minimum security conditions.”
Ascertaining a cloud-based solution’s security credentials is made doubly hard at the moment, because the security marking system is being reformed (see news). Dixon argued that the technical details behind the new standards need to be “nailed down” as soon as possible to inform commercial decisions.
Another major challenge surrounding the move to cloud computing is completing the transition from the old model of large ICT contracts to the new approach. Scott explained that departments must work out how to “couple the big stuff, that you absolutely must rely on, with the agility and some of the benefits of the cloud.”
John Cundy of the Home Office made a similar point, observing that most government departments are tied into long-term contracts “with little to no flexibility”. In many areas, the current challenge is to identify areas of ICT work that can move to the cloud, and are not currently provided under big SI contracts.
In some cases, departments can identify fields of work that could benefit from a move to cloud provision, but they’re provided as components of much bigger SI contracts: in these circumstances, it’s extremely difficult even to predict the potential savings, let alone to realise them. Vanessa Whittle, who works as a librarian at the Department for Work and Pensions, has encountered this problem: her team uses a small piece of off-the-shelf library system software which “would be ideal in the cloud,” she said, “and we’re trying to figure out how to get it on the [ICT team’s] agenda.” However, she explained, the application is part of a much bigger contract and “so it’s very difficult to say if it would be that much cheaper.”
Searching for skills
Whittle also argued that for Cloud First to become a reality, the search facilities on the CloudStore need dramatic improvement. She described the current set-up as “useless”, and said that she and her colleagues were “completely lost” when trying to navigate their way around it. “We couldn’t even find suppliers that we knew were on there,” she reported.
Andrew Hawkins, from Eduserv, said that this problem is already being addressed, and that suppliers are now required to be much more rigorous in their submissions to the CloudStore. “The search terms are clearer,” he reported, and the rules governing what can be listed on the site have been tightened. This also means that the CloudStore’s smattering of services that are not really cloud-based should start to diminish, he noted – responding to a claim by the MoJ’s Peter Scott that some of the services listed are merely “services with a badge”, and “not really cloud-y”.
To help civil servants make the right decision about which cloud-based services to buy, they will need to understand the new way of operating. Dixon stated that the MoD’s 10-point plan for cloud adoption highlights the need to improve the IT skills of its staff, while the ORR’s Alistair Gilchrist said he has been “very surprised by how few skills we [in the civil service] have in the area of IT, systems integration and security”.
Preetinder Cheema, strategy planning operations manager at the MoJ, noted that the skills shortage in ICT is by no means restricted to the public sector, but indicates a wider problem in the UK workforce. “My conclusion is that there is a general [ICT] skills gap in industry and the public sector,” he said – a gap that will continue to be a problem as the whole country gets used to a completely new way of buying and using ICT.
One way for the public sector to alleviate this problem would be for civil servants to collaborate in the transition to cloud computing, reflected Caroline Trimm, a ‘technology in business’ fast-streamer at the Home Office. Her fellow Home Office fast-streamer Christina Hamilton agreed, arguing that different teams should work together more closely in managing the change.
Their colleague John Cundy suggested going further than this, by enabling ICT and procurement specialists to move much more easily around government. He noted that many civil servants are reluctant to take up secondments in other departments because they fear their old job will disappear in their absence – but more flexibility in the workforce, he said, would help smooth the move to cloud-based ways of working. Creating this fluidity is one aim in April’s Civil Service Capability Plan, but delegates indicated they have yet to see any serious progress on the ground.
In search of silver linings
As well as staff, said Preetinder Cheema from the MoJ, information and advice also needs to move more freely around government: departments should make an effort to share their experiences, including those of failure. “I think we need to start testing these things and proving that [the] concepts work,” he said. With that confidence in place, Cheema asserted, the cloud initiative can be expected to gather momentum.
That said, Dixon reminded his colleagues that the cost savings of a move to cloud computing would be obscured in the short term by the expense of the transition. “You’ve got to resource the transformation,” he asserted – and that can actually necessitate an increase in the ICT budget before it facilitates a reduction.
The challenge, then, is to present a business case built on realistic assessments of the long-term financial benefits and other advantages of moving to the cloud. As Ian Winship, an account manager for Eduserv, claimed, this will involve a rethink in procurement practices. “The danger is that there’s a tendency for organisations to try to procure [cloud technology in] the way they have always procured [ICT],” he opined. “So we need new thinking in a procurement context, as well as about the technology itself.”
In this comment, Winship summed up the prevailing message of the discussion: that the kind of transformation that is at the heart of the Cloud First agenda is about much more than just ICT.
The incentive to change is clear: the cloud is already beginning to deliver cost savings to central government, Scott said, and it also promises to enhance efficiency. John Cundy commented that he expects the “benefits to snowball”, as more and more people in the civil service find out that cloud technology works.
For it to succeed, the move to cloud-based computing will require the public sector to change the way it conducts its business, and the civil service to develop new skills. Perhaps the biggest challenge, though, will be for different civil service teams and professions to work together: as Whittle said, success will rely on “the IT and business parts of an organisation working together to drive change.”