Interesting developments from our friends in the UK today. The British government's newly appointed chief information officer John Suffolk has been given new powers to sign-off all major IT projects with a particular focus placed on the creation of a country wide Cloud Computing infrastructure. Details of the new strategy were released as part of a Digital Britain report published earlier, which includes the development of “G-cloud” – a government-wide cloud computing network.
The report highlights the development of a virtual Public Service Network (PSN) with “common design, standards, service level agreements, security and governance.” which goes on to outline that "all those government bodies likely to procure ICT services should look to do so on a scalable, cloud basis such that other public bodies can benefit from the new capability,”
“The Digital Britain report recommends that the government take the necessary steps to secure that the Government CIO has a ‘double lock’ in terms of accountabilities and sign off for such projects. That will secure government-wide standards and systems” Needless to say, the need for cloud computing standards are now more important then ever with the UK joining a growing list of countries either exploring or activity building government sponsored clouds.
I should note I've been recently involved in similar discussions with the Canadian government regarding a national cloud strategy and platform. For anyone interested, I'm currently organizing a Canadian Federal Cloud Summit for this October in Ottawa. I will also be presenting the keynote at the upcoming Washington Cloud Standards summit on July 13th.
More details on the Digital Britain report are available here
