Government ‘Cloud Mandate’ Could Jumpstart Lagging Adoption in UK Public Sector and Beyond

John Marcus

Summary Bullets:

• The UK government’s G-Cloud Programme has suffered from setbacks, leading to limited uptake so far.  However, two recent developments – the commencement of the new G-Cloud iii framework, doubling the number of approved CloudStore suppliers, and the confirmation by the government last month of its ‘cloud first’ procurement strategy – should jumpstart British public sector migration to the cloud.
• Increased cloud adoption by government organizations, and indeed the high-level policy directive behind it, should have a knock-on effect within the enterprise market, first in semi-state and non-profit organizations and then increasingly in SME and corporate enterprises.

The G-Cloud Programme is a cross-government initiative led by two UK cabinet ministers (Justice and Home Office) as part of the official Government ICT Strategy, designed to leverage public cloud resources to reduce public sector spending and consolidate data centres.  The initial focus is on introducing cloud ICT services into government departments, local authorities and the wider public sector via a new procurement framework for IT services.  These services can then be reviewed and purchased through the G-Cloud’s CloudStore, which offers over 7,000 services from more than 700 suppliers in the areas of infrastructure (IaaS), software (SaaS), platform (PaaS), and specialist services.

Out of the Shadows: Making a Decentralized Approach to IT for Business

Amy Larsen DeCarlo

Summary Bullets:

• Flexibility is one of the prime benefits of a cloud-based IT consumption model, giving IT and non-technical employees capacity when they need it.  This access to resources enables organizations to execute new projects quickly and respond to fast-changing market dynamics.
• This appealing model has risks for the IT organization – issues around manageability and control are a natural byproduct of shadow IT.

While cost reductions are often the main driver for cloud adoption today, elasticity and accessibility distinguishes cloud from traditional methods. Organizations of many sizes gravitate toward the cloud to make it easier for individual business units and employees to tap IT resources to support organizational goals. Cloud can facilitate a more improvisational approach to technology and project management, allowing even non-technical users to dial up and down server and storage capacity for short term or cyclical projects.

Hacktivists Have the Upper Hand in an Environment Where Most Attacks Go Unreported

A. DeCarlo

Summary Bullets:

• Anonymous’ attack on UK government sites in protest of efforts to extradite WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange to Sweden mirror the continued trend of dogmatically driven cyber attacks.
• Troubling statistics point to real reticence on the part of the attacked organizations to prosecute breaches, with DDoS vendor Arbor Networks publishing figures which reveal that just 26% of all distributed denial of service attacks are actually reported.

The summer of 2012 has been a season of ‘hacktivist’ discontent.  A spate of recent politically motivated cyber attacks against governments, including Mexico and the United Kingdom, underscore the fact that profit is no longer the primary driver for IT-related breaches.  A number of breach investigation reports from the last two years highlight the rising tide of hacktivist-sponsored attacks (see: ‘Hacktivism’ Changes the Threat Landscape, Again, February 10, 2012), a trend which clearly continues as hackers employ even more sophisticated application-layer tactics to attack the organizations they oppose on political, legal, or philosophical grounds.

Crossing the Cloud Chasm: Learning from the U.S. Public Sector Advance

A. DeCarlo

Summary Bullets:

• The pressure is on organizations to leverage technology models like cloud services to improve efficiencies and cut costs, but many still struggle to produce workable on-demand computing strategies.
• Enterprises can learn from early adopters including the U.S. public sector, which has instituted mandates to encourage cloud use that should provide valuable insights to both the private sector and cloud providers.

Cloud computing is coming of age at a time when economic uncertainty and competitive pressures of globalization force organizations to be more efficient and more flexible.  As much as an on-demand computing model appeals as a way to cut costs and increase organizational agility, making the transition to the cloud can be difficult and complicated for enterprises that have substantial infrastructure and legacy applications.