Matthew 25:29

For unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance: but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath.

John 11:35

Tut, tut, mind your language Neil.

Do you suggest that the fine language of the King James Version is not suitable for tender ears?

(My father used to add the suffix 'and well he might', usually when complaining about something I had done...)

I run an app on my computer that I got created about 20 years ago (LOL so it's got no AI) and it continually pops "graffiti" onto the display every few minutes and often makes me compare today to the past - when I collected all the graffiti quotes. So I just updated an original Brendan Behan quote that just showed up so that it now describes today's world;

"Ninety-seven saint days a year wouldn't affect politics, but two AI's would ruin it."

It's so dystopian Luke 4:5 comes to mind.

Can we go back to filing cabinets and paper yet?

You can buy a lot of filing cabinets and employ a lot of secretaries for 6.5 Billion, and they just might do a better job of not selling private data and government secrets to whoever wants it.

Oracle will be in there sucking at the trough and overcharging us taxpayers for the mistakes that they made quoting for their slice of the pie. (SOP for them it seems)

This whole project will end in tears when that cloud simply evaporates.

and Amazon AWS

So they lose control over the data they process (the assumption commonly being that the 'cloud' provider will perform the necessary resilience and security). Unfortunately, evidence shows that's not always the case. Plus, they forget that even if these functions are outsourced successfully, the buck still stops where it always did when the accident happens.

Unless there's a real need for dynamic scalability (that's always been the major benefit of 'cloud') the main reason for transitioning must be the misapprehension that it'll be cheaper than on-prem. In the long run, that's not the case. And if you strip your IT team as part of the deal, you'll eventually find out they weren't redundant after all, as it's impossible to have the necessary finger on the pulse to the same degree when everything's remote. But by then you'll be locked in so it'll be very hard to unwind -- often, even to migrate to an alternative cloud provider.

"transition..."

From ancient mainframes, faxes, and parchment and quill

But mainly all those temporary patches cobbled together over the years to interface between incompatible systems

"Unless there's a real need for dynamic scalability (that's always been the major benefit of 'cloud') the main reason for transitioning must be the misapprehension that it'll be cheaper than on-prem."

Imagine explaining the complexities of creating and running big IT systems to an elderly relative who is hard of hearing, not very interested, and has no technical knowledge. Now imagine all the big decisions of government are taken by them. That's roughly where UK government is.

In the Department of Science, Innovation & Technology the Secretary of State holds a BA in History and Politics. Her junior ministers have degrees in Social & Political "Sciences", Law, a BA in French & German, and (possibly) Economics. Total science & technology education, nil. Cabinet Office, who have more of a say in IT related decisions have the PM (a Philosophy, politics & economics dosser), and the junior ministers have qualification in Law, and Modern History.

There's nobody in the executive branch of government understands anything about IT. However, they all believe as a matter of religion that "public sector = bad", "private sector = good".

Means a country run by private interests, of course.

The government is only there to decide who gets the pork.

"The government is only there to decide who gets the pork."

You meant to say 'which of friend/bloke down their pub' gets the job

we have a pretty new DC (about 4 years old) not much in it now but the business still presses on with sticking stuff in the cloud, mainly lift and shift VM's so the worst kind of migration! I'm fed up of saying leave it on prem, the DC still needs to be serviced and maintained whether its full or nearly empty, most of the costs of running the DC are pretty much the same full or empty a part from electric! We've migrated some VM's that now cost us upwards of £5k a year to run in the cloud that previously worked very well on prem for the grand total of next to feck all!

"We've migrated some VM's that now cost us upwards of £5k a year to run in the cloud that previously worked very well on prem for the grand total of next to feck all!"

Along with Birmingham CC, a whole litany of public and private tech disasters your microcosm shows we technologists have failed. Everyone who reads this site is a technologist in some form. Yet despite everything we know collectively, which is a fucking vast resource of tens of thousands of years of hard won experience we have precisely zero influence on government policy or bad corporate decisions. In that world it's all buzzword bingo driven by clowns with qualifications in shite like philosophy, economics or history, mal-influenced by slimey sales droids with mongo job titles and huge bonuses.

How did it come to this? At what point did we all hide our light under the bushel, or retire to the server cupboard with the Maplin catalogue?

And more importantly, is there any way that people who know stuff can reclaim the agenda from the clowns that know stuff all?

G-Cloud 13 also had a Lot 4 on it. Not a single competition has been run on it during the lifespan of G-Cloud 13.

There is also the Cloud Compute 2 Framework duplicating Lot 4 entirely.

Come on CCS - too many frameworks!

allow for up to 36 months with an optional 12-month extension.

Given that you can't just move services from one provider to another either the "winner" will have de facto permanent contract or there will be another contract for migration to yet another provider... and so forth.

At least tax payer will know their hard earned money is up in the clouds somewhere.

That said, surely there should be some sort of investigation why cloud is needed in the first place and why nothing is being done to have services set up on premise or at very least run by British company that pays taxes.

" UK government has launched two tenders for cloud services "

Well, there's a nice fat envelope for Capita,Palantir, and...maybe not Fujitsu as they're on the naughty step. Does Infosys have a finger in this pie too?

" that could jointly see up to £7.5 billion "

That's a ridiculous amount of money to piss up the wall on "some terribly important thing" that will be years late, an order of magnitude over budget, and might if we're lucky do about a quarter of the things it's supposed to do.

The government can come up with 7.5B for that, but paying teaching assistants / junior doctors (etc etc etc) is somehow too hard. Fixing basic infrastructure (crumbling schools/hospitals/roads) is somehow too hard. Yet this? Fuck's sake.

To put things into perspective, for £7.5bn government could build state run state-of-the-art data centre (or two) that could probably satisfy the needs of most departments.

and then have small running cost for staff and maintenance.

In my opinion this is insane.

So the low bidder will often get the contract.

If the low bidder has ties to a sketchy relative, they can regain their profits by coopting the hosted data.

Hope the low bidder isn't centered around 26.4450566,151.6266786.

For Ms Mone to make another quick buck?