The UK government is way behind on cloud services and needs to get more aggressive – that was the bald statement from Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff at its London Cloudforce event yesterday.
His view is that the government is too focused on virtualisation and the G-Cloud and runs too many expensive and under utilised data centres. If the government wants to cut costs he argues, cloud services and data centres consolidation are obvious action points, “and the government has to stop hiding behind the private cloud.”
Having worked on getting the certifications to enable it to pitch to the US government, Salesforce.com is now focusing its attention on the UK government sector and is engaging at high levels, including meetings with Cabinet Office Minister Francis Maude.
It is also addressing some of the compliance issues around data residency that have prevented it from being able to approach UK government so far: it plans to open a UK-based data centre next year and is introducing a Data Residency Option for its Database.com service (see Salesforce.com dreams of the social enterprise) that allows subscribing organisations to run the applications in the public cloud but store data wherever they chose.
As we pointed out in our UK Government ICT strategy: progress and direction, report earlier this month, there has indeed been limited progress on data centre consolidation, and cloud computing progress has been slow. The emphasis has also altered, from viewing the cloud from a new technology perspective, to looking more at the commercial model and identifying examples of where it “works.”
The cloud computing strategy is due to be published later this year, which will provide insight into how the government will progress. It probably won’t be the answer to Benioff’s UK public sector dreams given that he backs the public cloud to the hilt whereas the government may well take a more pragmatic “whatever works” hybrid approach. But it might open the door. Progress around the cloud strategy coupled with the government support for a broader spectrum of suppliers - specifically SME’s – could mean a shake-up in the supplier landscape.