UK government spends another £1B on cloud migration and services
- Reference: 1733224455
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2024/12/03/uk_gov_cloud_services/
- Source link:
The Crown Commercial Service, a unit of the Cabinet Office, has awarded another chunk of the G-Cloud 14 framework, under which a maximum value of £1 billion could be spent. It is the last award to be made under the new framework for cloud computing and associated services.
The [1]latest award is for Lot 4 of the competition, with 42 suppliers winning places on the framework. It is designed to help UK public sector and third sector organizations transition to cloud software or hosting services. This might include the provision of planning services "to enable customers to move to cloud software and/or hosting services," an official posting said.
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Setup and migration are also part of the offering and might involve the process of consolidating and transferring a collection of workloads. Workloads can include emails, files, calendars, document types, related metadata, instant messages, applications, user permissions, compound structure, and linked components. Security services, quality assurance and performance testing, and training also make up part of the offering.
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Forty-two companies, including Aire Logic and Version One Solutions, are among the winning bidders. Some familiar companies winning places on the framework are Capgemini, CGI, Ernst & Young, and Deloitte.
The Lot 4 award follows the award of Lots 1 to 3, [5]made in a single announcement last month , with the total expected maximum value of £6.5 billion ($8.2 billion). The competition for these services was [6]launched in February .
[7]Someone's finally taking on £10M Hull City Council ERP deal to replace Oracle
[8]UK.gov to chuck up to £5B to gang of back office software vendors
[9]UK government faces £17.5M shortfall from UKCloud liquidation
[10]UK govt office admits ability to negotiate billions in cloud spending curbed by vendor lock-in
G-Cloud 14 is set to replace 13. In April, a government spokesperson told The Register its cloud framework agreements offered the widest range of suppliers for the cloud market, including 5,000 suppliers on G-Cloud 13, with 91 percent of them SMEs.
"Government's Cloud First policy is kept under regular review to ensure it reflects the latest guidance and recommendations and states that organizations should always scrutinize their selection of vendors," they said.
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However, [12]The Register also uncovered a document from the Cabinet Office's Central Digital & Data Office (CDDO), which said: "UK government's current approach to cloud adoption and management across its departments faces several challenges," which combined "risk concentration and vendor lock-in that inhibit UK government's negotiating power over the cloud vendors."
Following the July election of a new government, the CDDO is set to move from the Cabinet Office to the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology. ®
Get our [13]Tech Resources
[1] https://www.find-tender.service.gov.uk/Notice/038131-2024
[2] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offprem/paasiaas&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2Z085MdFJjItPH3TcefBOwQAAAMQ&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[3] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offprem/paasiaas&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44Z085MdFJjItPH3TcefBOwQAAAMQ&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[4] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offprem/paasiaas&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33Z085MdFJjItPH3TcefBOwQAAAMQ&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[5] https://www.find-tender.service.gov.uk/Notice/037392-2024
[6] https://www.theregister.com/2024/02/26/uk_gov_cloud_services/
[7] https://www.theregister.com/2024/10/18/workday_erp_hull_city_council/
[8] https://www.theregister.com/2024/07/26/ukgov_bak_office_tech/
[9] https://www.theregister.com/2024/04/29/uk_government_ukcloud_costs/
[10] https://www.theregister.com/2024/04/04/uk_cddo_admits_cloud_spending_lock_issues_exclusive/
[11] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offprem/paasiaas&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44Z085MdFJjItPH3TcefBOwQAAAMQ&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[12] https://www.theregister.com/2024/04/04/uk_cddo_admits_cloud_spending_lock_issues_exclusive/
[13] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
It is the latest band wagon
I see the cloud as a vehicle for certain (erratic) workloads, for which it is very good.
I've seen people move off the mainframe and the true costs expand.
You used to have two people responsible for a few (large machines). You now have many more people responsible for many cheaper machines, and keeping them up to date with fixes etc.
Taking backups and doing disaster recovery was handled by a few people. On the cloud it is much harder, because there are more machines etc.
One customer said they had spare cycles they were not using on their mainframe. The CIO said improve your testing, by testing higher volumes and covering more areas.
The pendulum will swing. "We used to rent time on a machines. They we brought it in house to make it easier and cheaper to mange, now we rent time in the cloud"... guess what will happen next.
Cloud has been good to make people look at their processes and improve them.
> I'm missing something
Standardization of solutions maybe?
When a smart owner leaves, it will be easier to understand what is what in the custom architecture without introducing security holes, for example.
Re: I'm clearly missing something
Cloud is someone else's computer. That someone else is very cool, has all the great toys and is popular.
But real answer is probably simple - corruption. Most likely the usual suspects convinced the decision makers, over champagne on a brown envelope coaster, that the cloud is the solution to all the problems.
So billions will be spent and most of the work will be done by a couple of blokes on £60k.
Re: I'm clearly missing something
Becsuse it's a buzz word that makes CIO and CFO feel important & gives consultancies & MSPs a way to shaft government for more money.
I worked on planning a DC move, cloud was 300% more expensive than new DC space, new hardware AND the cost of migration. Yet Gartner & CCS STILL couldn't understand why we didn't want to go to the Cloud. And that was BEFORE the latest few years price increases in cloud.
Councils especially run very stable very important workloads that don't change much, so won't gain Anything from server less or the abilities that cloud provides. Add to this, the INSANELY cheap deal CCS negotiated for datacentre space at CCS DCs, got councils cloud is a massive money sink.
Re: I'm clearly missing something
>Councils especially run very stable very important workloads that don't change much, so won't gain Anything from server less
But cloud also offers near-instant global location portability.
So if Solihull town council suddenly needed to move operations to Hawaii then AWS/Azure/GCloud etc could accommodate them much more seamlessly than moving a mainframe.
- Seriously at an early SUN (that's how long ago) cloud conference once, Rolls Royce Aerospace were extolling the virtues of their new cloudy system which meant that if they wanted to move their jet engine business from Derby to anywhere else in the world then their IT could move with it almost instantly.
Erm....
Aren't companies starting to move away from the cloud as it makes them less resilient, less secure, and places them at the mercy of price hikes?
I'm guessing this government policy was cooked up some time ago, governments usually being last on the bandwagon. Perhaps in tandem with this, they need to begin work on a future strategy to move these folks back off the cloud, in a few years time.
Or maybe they could just keep them off the cloud, improve their security, and donate £1bn to Oracle, compensating them for the public money they would otherwise have bagged.
I'm clearly missing something
So I work in IT for a small local council, several hundred employees serving a couple of hundred thousand residents. Why do I need to push everything to the cloud? There's a bit of a budget problem at the moment as you may have noticed, so cost is absolutely my watchword. Cloud is definitely not cheaper than what we're doing at the moment, so that's out. The main benefits of cloud seem to be connectivity and scalability. Well the number of residents in the area is pretty fixed, we're not going to have a million or so people move in over night, so rapid scalability isn't necessary. All our staff are pretty much within commuting distance from the building, so distributed hosting would gain us nothing, and our infrastructure holds up well to WFH needs. Security is a concern, but as we know, cloud is by no means secure, and presents a much, much larger available attack surface than our set up.
So, why should I be spending extra money on cloud at a time when we really don't have it to spare? Genuine question, I really would love some insight to prove me wrong here.