Issue 3, April 2009


FOCUS GOVERNMENT


CLOUD COMPUTING COULD BLOW POLICIES OFF COURSE


The impact of cloud computing on public sector ICT may be “more revolutionary than the advent of the PC”, according to a new Socitm (Society of IT Management) briefing, Cloud Computing on the Horizon. The implication is that department managers can bypass the slow-moving IT department and order their IT services elsewhere.


Could this create a shift of computing power away from the public sector data center? Using web resources to provide facilities and services hosted elsewhere on the internet could have an even more revolutionary impact on public sector ICT than the advent of the PC in the 1980s, claims the Socitm briefing.


“The potential benefits of the cloud for public services include flexibility and lower costs. This is because the burden of acquiring and maintaining server infrastructure and data centers can be shifted outside the organisation,” it states.


The procurement process is one of the worst consumers of greenhouse gases, but the agility cloud computing offers for exploiting information brings with it security and business continuity risks. Public sector ICT managers may reject it for this reason. However, a ‘fortress’ approach is untenable, says the briefing.


As with the PC revolution, managers will buy their own IT capacity if corporate ICT denies it to them. This time around many managers already have the infrastructure at their disposal, and will use it to get what they want.


“The ever-widening gap between service demand and resource availability dictates that we take the cloud seriously and fully exploit the possibilities,” says briefing author Chris Head. “Cloud computing offers cheap and easily set up services. Its use by the private sector will create expectations of responsiveness among those using public services.”


Local authority IT managers must prepare strategies now to embrace cloud computing and associated developments. Otherwise, they could be bypassed as their department heads realise the meaning of Software as a Service (SaaS), Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and service-oriented architecture (SOA).


Having just one active directory has made things much more efficient, as all files can be accessed from one data center. The decision to rationalise seemed to be less about physical resources and more about humans.


“Edinburgh has a lot of financial institutes and they tend to attract much of the available talent,” says Unsworth. “The skills base to help us operate effectively was not there.”


Consolidating a data center around a private company also offers financial advantages. “In the public sector, if we wanted to make the investment to modernise our data center, it would take a long time to get the expenditure decision passed. But BT could make the investment decision a lot quicker.


“It’s easier to justify for BT, because it’s their core business and everyone understands IT, whereas we would have to argue the case on why it’s more important to spend this money on a data center rather than, say, a new school,” says Unsworth.


Not that the users notice. The data center is invisible to them and there are fewer reasons to be aware of its existence as there are far


fewer incidents reported. Changes to the IT infrastructure are a lot easier to roll out now that the user base is uniform.


Upgrades or installations can be rolled out from one central management workstation. A new user, a department, or a complete application suite for HR can be installed onto 2,000 desks from one data center manager’s desk.


Where once there was a diaspora of 400 application servers spread around the city in various IT centers, there is now one host. Engineers don’t waste time – nor are they willing to burn petrol – travelling to various sites. It’s all in-house now. The only traffic build-up is by the coffee machine.


“As a council moving to a new headquarters, they wanted to make low-energy consumption a priority. So we needed to design IT in a specific way and look at service delivery. We’ve got Tier 3 redundancy from Scottish Power and three back-up generators,” explains BT’s service director, Gavin Finlayson.


Rationalising IT, either around an internally run colocation or an outsourced job, suggests


that computing is a back-office supporting function and a cost that needs to be controlled. However, there is a school of thought that IT should lead any organisation.


Barnsley Council’s work offers evidence that IT can be used to help create jobs in the local area and stimulate new businesses. Ken Rutt, Barnsley’s assistant chief executive for information services, admits it started out as being a virtualisation project to reduce costs, but the data center grew to become a profit generator and a creater of jobs.


The council moved away from a tired old building (a converted magistrates court) into a purpose-built facility in Oakwell, with water-cooled air, two UPSs, two generators and two different links to electricity substations.


The rationalisation and subsequent day- to-day management of the data center was carried out by a joint company – Bull TCL – formed between the council and its historical technology partner Bull.


All Barnsley’s IT staff were transferred to the new company, which was given a contract to run IT for the council for 10 years in a deal worth £110m.


The first action was a rationalisation that helped the council meet its emissions targets. Using VMWare, TCL rationalised its data center from 170 Intel servers to six.


The advantage of this mutually owned company is that it can offer services to other organisations in the region. North Yorkshire Council, for example, uses TCL’s colocation and support services. Now Bull TCL has pledged to create 86 new jobs in the coming year and to offer support and training to any public or private ventures in the area. “We’re creating more jobs and business in an area that needs supporting,” says Rutt.


Britain is slowly evolving into a more efficient model. ‘We’re evolutionary rather than revolutionary’ is a popular boast among Britain’s IT leaders. But the problem with evolution is that generations have to die before you can make any progress.


In July last year, the British Government claimed it was the first in the world to announce plans to slash the carbon footprint of its computer systems. We asked the Cabinet Office to provide evidence of any progress since then. They didn’t get back to us.


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