According to Reuven Cohen of Enomaly, UK Govt. is planning to release a countrywide Cloud Infrastructure. We, here at Cloud Ave, are a strong advocate of the use of Cloud Computing to make the Government more agile and efficient. You can check out the following posts on the topic.
- Riffing on the SaaS for the Government Meme
- Govt 1.0 and Govt 2.0, A Comparison
- USA.Gov Moving To Clouds
- E-Government – It’s Not Just the US Leading the Charge
- More Support For Putting Government On The Clouds
- Obama Team Talks About Putting Govt. On The Clouds
- Government’s Role in IT
- Barack Obama and Cloud Computing
According to Reuven, British Government has appointed a Chief Information Officer and has given him powers to sign-off all major IT projects with a particular focus placed on the creation of country wide Cloud Computing infrastructure. This public cloud infrastructure will be based on standards, secure, and compliant to all regulatory measures. All the Government bodies could tap into this Cloud for their needs. This a pretty good move. In fact, one of the biggest gripes of certain governments about public clouds is that they are not compliant with the country specific regulations. By building a countrywide government public cloud, various departments (in federal/central, state and local governments) can tap into this Cloud and reap the benefits associated with Cloud Computing. This is a win-win situation where Government moves to the Cloud while still being compliant to the regulatory measures.
I just hope they do the same thing in US too. President Obama and his team are serious about Cloud Computing and, in fact, the Republicans are also supportive of the move to clouds. With this bipartisan support for Government Clouds, the US federal, state and local governments can be made more agile and efficient while empowering the people with the Open Government concept. In fact, sometime back I even wrote a post offering support to William Hurley’s call for a National Computing Cloud to serve academic community. I feel that Government’s role in building Cloud Infrastructure is important and it will end up making Government more nimble and agile. At the end of the day, people with all political flavors support efficiency in the Governments.
