Minister for the Cabinet Office, Francis Maude, recently made the statement that British bureaucracy should be recreated in the image of Silicon Valley technology companies that “move fast and break things”. UK-based Cloud Services Provider (CSP) Outsourcery, agrees that this should be a universal goal and also recognises that the Government’s G-Cloud initiative and ‘Cloud First’ policy will be a key driver in achieving this.
Last month, the current Head of G-Cloud, Tony Singleton, said that approximately 90 percent of local authorities in the UK have yet to procure a service from the G-Cloud’s online marketplace CloudStore. In light of this, Outsourcery believes that some education around the cloud is still needed. But the company believes this figure is also just an early indicator of a much broader adoption that has already begun in central government.
“While take up figures may be relatively low at present, there is real potential for this to grow,” said Piers Linney, co-CEO of Outsourcery. “G-Cloud offers flexible and scalable cloud services that allow public sector organisations to adopt the services they need. Figures from the Cloud Industry Forum revealed that 69 percent of UK organisations formally adopted at least one cloud-based service in the last year and as confidence in cloud services within local government increases, adoption will rise, enabling the development of a faster and more efficient public sector.
“Outsourcery is currently working alongside Microsoft and Dell to design and deploy a high security cloud platform, accredited to carry `OFFICIAL’ classified documentation with Information Assurance (IA) in to the PSN, specifically for the UK government. With continuous industry developments like this one breaking down security barriers, we are likely to achieve the mainstream adoption of cloud within local government very soon. This will be the beginning of a Silicon Valley attitude within the UK government and we welcome this ethos, which already matches the innovative stance we take at Outsourcery.”
