18th August 2011Amazon launched its new service GovCloud yesterday, in a bid to support cloud computing commitments in US Government. AWS GovCloud (US) Region was announced on Amazon’s blog with a clear focus on national data security, and a ‘come and get us’ call to other worldwide governments interested in moving to the clouds. So, why isn’t UK Government getting involved? Something to do with it being holiday season, perhaps…
Ok, we’ve been pretty pre-occupied with other stuff over here in the UK of late (riots, economies collapsing around us, etc), but it appears news from the Cabinet Office relating to public sector cloud computing has dried up.
You have to go back to the end of July for any recent cloud-related announcements of note. Of course, there was also a release at the start of August about the successful ICT savings made since the coalition government came into power last May, but in main these savings have been thanks to the complete cut-off in IT department expenditure, as opposed to any innovative changes or uptake of cloud services.
Meanwhile, yesterday saw the announcement in the US that Amazon had developed a new cloud service, GovCloud, specifically designed to encourage the country’s government agencies into moving to cloud computing.
The service will adhere to strict national security protocol by only offering access to US citizens, and being based solely on American soil. In yesterday’s Web Service blog post, Amazon evangelist Jeff Barr stated GovCloud would support the processing and storage of International Traffic in Arms (ITAR) controlled data and the hosting of ITAR controlled applications as part of its scrupulous security processes.
Amazon services available through GovCloud include Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC), on a pay as you go plan.
Departments already using the service and reporting successful results include NASA and the US Treasury, with speculation that many more will make the move.
In the meantime, we wait with baited breath as to what the next step UK Government will make in its overhaul of IT services and the G-Cloud transformation. It is unlikely any announcements of note will be made until the end of August (end of holiday?) by which time other nations could be racing ahead in talks with AWS and new cloud computing programs, especially if they answer the call-to-arms in Jeff Barr’s blog post sign off:
“PS - As you might be able to guess from the name of this Region, we would be interested in talking to other sovereign nations about their cloud computing needs.”
And still we wait. But could a switch to AWS GovCloud be an option for UK government, anyway? Aside from the related contractual issues, AWS has been blighted by a number of outages recently, including in Europe, which could easily be affecting any kind of service uptake in the near future.
CloudPro were the first news site to pose the question to Amazon yesterday, but have yet to receive a response. It seems unlikely in any case, with data centre consolidation seemingly the focus in the UK and G-Cloud put on the backburner.
However if I’m wrong about this, and Amazon happen to announce an agreement with the UK Government for their cloud services to be moved into various cabinet office departments with immediate effect, err…I won’t be able to answer any of the angry governmental calls – I’ll be on holiday.
Chris Ward, BCN Editor
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