UK cloud computing strategy could save up to £3.2bn a year, says
Cabinet Office.
The government has unveiled a sweeping strategy to create
its own internal "cloud computing" system – such as that
used by Google, Microsoft and Amazon – as part of a radical
plan that it claims could save up to £3.2bn a year from an
annual bill of at least £16bn.
The key part of the new strategy, outlined by the Cabinet
Office minister Angela Smith, will be the concentration of
government computing power into a series of about a dozen
highly secure data centres, each costing up to £250m to
build, which will replace more than 500 presently used by
central government, police forces and local authorities.
The government will also push for "open source" software to
be used more widely among central and local government's 4m
desktop computers. That poses an immediate threat to
Microsoft, whose Windows operating system and Office
applications suite is at present firmly embedded as the
standard on PCs in government, such as the NHS, which is one
of the largest users in Europe.
But John Suffolk, the government's chief information
officer, pointed out that cost savings of just £100 per
machine would total £400m across government. Unlike Windows,
open source operating systems such as Linux have no
licensing costs and can be used on as many machines as
required.
By 2015, the strategy suggests, 80% of central government
desktops could be supplied through a "shared utility
service" – essentially a cloud service resembling Google
Docs, which lets people create documents online for free.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/jan/27/cloud-computing-government-uk
