IT AND DATA
Standards and innovation: good bedfellows?
Cloud computing has revolutionised the way the public sector selects and deploys new technology, delivering hugely significant savings across Government, argue Rhys Sharp, public sector CTO at SCC, and Dr Markus Leberecht, who leads on cloud architecture & strategy for Europe, Middle East & Africa at Intel.
D
espite a very strong start, we still have some way to go before the true value of
cloud computing is revealed, enabling the delivery of a new generation of truly innovative software and solutions dedicated to improving front line public services.
While G-Cloud’s development has been overwhelmingly successful, we believe there is still some way to go before we can unlock its real promise. Before that happens, with a number of issues needing to be solved, we require the development of new standards to help the industry to both overcome extant technical factors and to fully exploit cloud’s potential for government.
The issue rests on a single premise: that the ‘walled garden’ approach to government ICT has resulted in a situation where frequently conflicting implementations of core technologies leave departments with inflexible and expensive bespoke systems that cannot interoperate. This makes adoption by other public services extremely challenging, resulting in a situation where the state has paid to build a multitude of distinct systems designed to do essentially the same job.
The adoption of universal technical standards would reverse this situation, establishing a clear set of rules that would not only make it simpler for government to develop and deploy solutions across multiple departments, but would also enable a
new generation of innovative, cutting-
edge SMEs to enter the market – boosting competition and driving down costs.
When it comes to cloud computing, the most commonly quoted issue is security, with both good and bad news in this area.
Neil MacDonald, Gartner vice president and fellow, predicted in 2010: “By 2015, security and privacy will no longer be the chief concerns regarding the adoption of cloud by business executives.”
Yet despite this confidence a consensus is emerging that the security demands on cloud services often go beyond anything small and medium-sized organisations can afford to build and manage themselves. Part of the problem is that the public cloud is lacking in security standards, with the existing ISO 270001 representing a
good start but essentially
remaining a generic underpinning framework for secure businesses operations.
Keenly aware of this fact, the technology business is rallying, with industry
bodies
such as the Open Data Centre Alliance (ODCA) seeking to introduce new standards, accreditations and codes of practice for the delivery of cloud computing.
Once the security question has been removed, there is one other major factor acting as a barrier to innovation – our legacy systems. Many government ICT infrastructures today were built from the ground up using proprietary technologies to create applications that, while functional, are based on closed systems and outdated licensing policies that no longer fulfill the public sector’s needs.
The promised cost savings offered by cloud computing rely on pooling resources across many tenants, and cannot be realised if too many organisational
and technical borders, many historically created, are allowed to persist. The IT industry has therefore learned that a standardisation of data formats, applications, and processes are an essential component of well-organised cloud adoption strategies.
Software vendors can contribute to this process by opening up their software and describing the data formats and structures. It is in their interest to do so, as allowing other providers to access data enables new systems to be built that keep legacy systems current while also offering the customer fresh innovation.
Setting standards for widely stored sets of data is the next step required to unleash cloud’s potential. Currently more than 400 councils deliver 100-plus services to citizens and store data about their delivery, but there are more than 50 different ways in which the data is stored – meaning that it is almost impossible to get any sort of unified or comparative view.
Whilst technical standards lay the necessary foundation of technical interoperability, much more is required to create an element of trust between a cloud service provider and a cloud service consumer. A joint understanding of usage models is being formulated by the Open Data Center Alliance (ODCA) and may be used to judge cloud service provider offerings in the future.
Despite this, it may still be a challenge for smaller entities to understand the multitude of facets that cloud offerings can have.
A further suggestion, therefore, would be the creation of sector-specific purchasing guides written jointly by IT industry stakeholders and customer representatives. Germany’s BITKOM – the Federal Association for Information Technology, Telecommunications and New Media – has issued a guide to the German industry’s SMB sector for the selection of secure cloud service providers with great success, providing a potential route forward for UK plc.
FOR MORE INFORMATION
T: 0845 351 0505 E:
optimisecloud@scc.com W:
www.scc-cloud-computing.com
public sector executive Sep/Oct 13 | 49
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