We have been mulling over whether the UK Government’s ‘Cloud First’ Policy announced over the weekend will have a significant impact on the way Government departments and agencies behave when procuring ICT products and services. To summarise Minister for the Cabinet Office, Francis Maude, has stated that “purchases through the cloud should be the first option considered by public sector buyers of products and services”.
To some extent this is just formalising what has already been in place; the Cabinet Office has already been reviewing ICT projects and giving them the yay or neigh depending on their fit with the UK Government ICT strategy. As a result, it is debatable whether this ‘formalisation’ (indeed a mandate for central government departments and agencies) will make a huge difference. Departments will continue to formulate their own plans about how to move to the cloud, though for any new procurement they will have to prove that alternatives to the cloud offer better value for money. What is important for suppliers to start to accept is that the Cabinet Office is being successful in changing behaviours across central government whether that is around their working with SMEs, encouraging digital transformation, or moving to the ‘cloud’. And suppliers need to be increasingly cognizant of this new normal. The journey may be a slow one but it is a journey nonetheless.
It is hoped that the Cloud First Policy will boost business through the Government Cloudstore. And it is likely that departments and agencies will increasingly look to the framework as a procurement channel in order to show their support of ‘cloud first’ (even if the ‘cloud' purchased isn’t true cloud!). The policy announcement came on the same day as G-Cloud iii (Cloudstore) went live with 708 companies vying for business – 368 more than on the previous iteration. SMEs make up 80% of the companies on the Cloudstore; indeed we understand that Skyscape (see Skyscape wins major Iaas Cloudstore deal) will soon announce the largest ever sale to go through the framework. But larger players are also present; some, such as TCS, joining for G-Cloud iii. So far many of the Cloudstore sales have been related to cloud advisory services (consultancy) or traditional web hosting services. But there is still a desire to drive ‘public cloud’ adoption. Companies like Amazon Web Services (AWS) remain absent from the framework but there are IT services companies, such as Cognizant, offering cloud migration services to these providers.