Walking into a meeting in Government in Australia and saying the word ‘cloud’, has for the past few years, been like saying ‘bomb’ on a plane. It’s pretty much a conversation killer.
But in 2012, I invite you to take a look around and see all the business applications that are starting to be consumed by government, from the ‘cloud’. “What’s changed?” I hear you ask. Nothing. It’s just that people are starting to get used to the idea, and there is far less ambiguity as to what ‘cloud’ actually is. Oh, and money talks. When you talk about savings of 80%, or ROI in 3 months, people start to listen.
I keep writing ‘cloud’ in inverted commas because we need to define the term. Cloud can be defined as “Providing ICT resources over a network, as a service, in a dynamic and scalable way.” But this definition tends to confuse the matter further, in that, the cloud we’re all really talking about is the public cloud. Nobody cares if you want to setup a private cloud because it’s just throwing more money at your internal ICT infrastructure. Your IT department is happy because they’re involved, and it doesn’t involve hosting your ‘sensitive’ data off-shore; raising privacy and security ‘issues’. More inverted commas.
The cloud we’re all talking about is the public cloud, where ICT vendors find economy of scale in servicing multiple customers from a single platform, lowering entry costs for customers. Consumer applications have been leading the drive to the public cloud; banking, social networking, file sharing, email, etc. But now business applications are almost as prevalent, the poster child of course being CRM and salesforce.com. But look closer and you will see Financial, ERP, file sharing, and line of business apps everywhere, and being adopted en mass by businesses. And Government. I hear you gasp.
The key reason Australian Government has been fearful of adopting cloud applications is the perception that their data will not be safe if it is hosted outside their organisation. And if they can get past that, then they are even more scared of it going outside of Australia. Some are even scared of their data leaving their state because of perceived differences in state law.
Some Government agencies have done their due diligence and are well within their rights to have concerns for certain data being located in certain jurisdictions. But for the most part, a little homework would help them to realize that, if they write their contracts well, and manage the risks, it’s just outsourcing. We’ve been doing it for years, but now it’s called cloud.
And this is exactly what APRA (Australian Prudential Regulation Authority) and AGIMO (Australian Government Information Management Office) say about cloud; assess and manage the risks. Don’t confuse ‘onshore’ with ‘secure’, because data security, privacy, location, and jurisdiction are all very different things.
Many Government agencies are now taking their data to the cloud, and many off-shore because they know the risks and they are managing them accordingly. My earlier definition of cloud looks at five key characteristics of cloud. There is a truer way to look at public cloud, and that is to redefine it altogether as a delivery model; the ‘utility’ model of delivering ICT resources.
Back in the late 1800s the power industry reached a maturity where electricity could be delivered ‘as a service’ to businesses and homes, and power generation was managed centrally. Businesses no longer had to manage their own power generation infrastructure, formerly maintaining boiler rooms and steam turbines and such. Subscribers could take as much power as they wanted, when they wanted it, and they only had to pay for what they used; sound familiar?
The same thing is now happening with ICT. It’s increasingly much more cost effective to take ICT resources on-demand in this way, than to manage your own infrastructure and moving forward it’s what we’ll all be doing, I guarantee it.
So when tackling the question of ‘do we or don’t we?’ Try these tips.
- Realise that within your organization there may be some whose interest is not served by cloud, such as IT professionals maintaining internal servers and infrastructure.
- Price may be a deciding factor for you. Compare the cost of cloud versus on-premise and you may be very surprised at how cost effective it can be.
- Assess the risks of taking your data off premise, and think. ‘Who is likely to be better at managing data security, someone whose core business is managing data security, or your in-house IT guys?’
- Get the facts straight. There is a lot of misinformation about cloud, and a lot of people talking when they should be listening.
So, you can do cloud, and you can host your data offshore. Just make the right, informed decision for your business.
As published in Local Government Manager – March 2012
