Google Apps rubber-stamped for use by US gov
Google has introduced a version of Google Apps certified for use by the US government. Announced today during a press event at the company's Mountain View headquarters, Google Apps for Government offers the same applications as the existing Premiere Edition of the online application suite, and it carries the same price tag: $50 …
Where's the UK version for the G-Cloud, Eric?
Certification by the CESG for PROTECT-COMMERCIAL or less would be fine...
This is just the ticket for typical UK government use and would save an absolute fortune as the Microsoft Office monopoly crumbles. It would mean that the existing machines won't need updating just to run the latest version of Office and might result in a better choice of browser.
Come on ToryDems, grow some gonads and save some real money
...the ConDem Nation runs on IE6, remember?
And IE6 isn't exactly welcome in CloudLand...
..to the Telephone Cloud (aka "Public Switched Telephone System") ?
Apparently all sorts of business and private secrets are happily communicated IN THE CLEAR over the telephone system. Mobiles only encrypt until the signal reaches the next tower.
Cloud Computing has so many economic advantages attached to it - think of getting rid of lots of sysadmins and a ton of management headaches - that it must succeed. Hundreds of thousands of sysadmins currently perform the same complex tasks, make the same mistakes and create the same problems in tens of thousands of IT departments.
All of that is much more economically performed by a 1/100 of those people working in centralized Cloud Service Providers. Companies need Email, ERP and Website services, they don't really want to know the nuts and bolts of Exchange, AIX HCMP or the twists of ORANET. Neither do they really want to employ and manage an Oracle DB admin.
Or fiddle with the DLL and Registry Hell of Windoze. All they want is an appliance like the telephone system which is managed by a service provider. Think of the Chrome Browser running Javascript Cloud Apps.
Ever hear of the term "bottleneck"? Not to mention a whole assortment of potential new problems/abuses.
There's no such thing as a quick fix and this most assuredly isn't one.
...it will be possible to provision webapp hosting for UK government without the whole exercise being so expensive and time consuming as to kill the business case.
The status quo benefits no-one apart from the big suppliers who are the only ones rich and enough to play. Pick three suppliers, eliminate one on a technicality, have the second one drop out when they realise the endless scope creep will have them making a loss; take the last one too stupid to realise what they're getting into, fail. That one only cost £70 million. Now rinse and repeat...
Just imagine having the top three cloud suppliers on a cross-govt preferred supplier list with transparent pricing. The developers could develop stuff and the security bods could focus on application security.
A geek can dream...
Where is the the UK Google data centre the *notional* UK Gov systems would run from?
Has *no* one learned from 30 years of outsourcing government IT around the world?
