Stop delaying the G-Cloud

Or we might end up lagging behind our competitor countries, again

The National Audit Office (NAO) last week released a report criticising the government's paltry attempts to create a G-Cloud.

It states simply: "The government has not taken advantage of cloud computing."

Are you surprised? I doubt it.

Most UK-based cloud events I have attended mention the "hotly anticipated" or "eagerly awaited" G-Cloud. But this is often followed by a deflationary statement along the lines of "we don't expect it for some time yet", or "the spending cuts will not have helped progress."

You get the idea. No one really expects the G-Cloud to live up to its promise of massive datacentre consolidation, extensive shared services or an exciting app store anytime soon.

But why not? I know we are currently experiencing some of the largest public sector spending cuts we have ever seen, and that our economy contracted in the fourth quarter of 2010 against expectations, and yes, these are all perfectly good arguments for holding off, but we need to think about the bigger picture here.

Following the release of the NAO report, our American cousins announced their ICT policy for the coming year and the picture there is very different. Of the $80bn (£50bn) federal CIO Vivek Kundra had to allocate to ICT spending, a whopping one quarter will be invested in a "cloud-first" policy.

Kundra expects this to cut spend on datacentres by 30 per cent and result in 800 datacentre closures by 2015.

In his cloud computing strategy document Kundra urged the US government to tap into innovation, and he has also been cited as saying that the government needs to spend less time running IT infrastructure and more time running the country.

And who wouldn't agree with him? Perhaps our government is too preoccupied with making cuts and slashing budgets for short-term benefits to put any real effort into realising long-term gains and efficiencies that a G-Cloud could bring to the country over the next 10 to 20 years.

But if we're not careful, we will be left with an IT infrastructure that lags behind other top economies - to our detriment.

The US created conditions conducive to the creation of the Silicon Valley tech hub 20 years ago, and continues to reap the rewards from it now. While our government has only just caught up with the programme and is currently promoting its big idea - east London-based Silicon Roundabout. Arguably too little, too late.

We need to be careful not to repeat the mistake in terms of both scope of ambition and timing with the G-Cloud.

In recognising that long-term growth can be secured by planting some deep tech roots in our economy, David Cameron is spot on.

However, I don't think this will happen if the government itself is not willing to lead the way and highlight what can be achieved through cloud implementation.

If the government shows confidence in this sector, everyone else will feel more at ease with advancing a forward-looking technology programme.

But an IT project manager said to me yesterday: "Being in the public sector I don't think we will put anything in the cloud anytime soon." His reticence was palpable.

So I won't get my hopes up.

Derek du Preez, Reporter.