"McDonagh attributed that first delay to the US operations being uncomfortable with the possibility their data might need to be subject to a UK government audit and their concerns had to be soothed."

So who will have what authority to look at what?

On American soil means American access to everything.

Gov.uk already on Amazon

Gov.uk resolves to an IP address which is part of "Amazon Web Services, Elastic Compute Cloud, EC2, EU", according to whois(8). Attempting an HTTP connection to gov.uk gets you a re-write to www.gov.uk, which is serviced up by Akamai/Edgekey.

The Cabinet Office Blog is hosted by Wordpress.

But, as demonstrated at yesterdays PSEICT conference in London, there already organisations listing themselves as being IL2 and IL3 accredited solutions within G-Cloud. This is great for public sector purchasers who's solutions are local - but for those supplying services nationally then we are having to look for IL4 solutions - which as yet are some time coming.

Discussions? WTF?

"But that's the beauty of G-Cloud. We are still in discussions with Amazon about how they get on framework 3"

So now the G-Cloud team are "reaching out" to Amazon? Strange, when my SME (anonymous for obvious reasons) went through the G-Cloud application process, there wasn't much in the way of discussions... you follow the framework process, or you don't get in.

Still, nice to see one rule for multinationals, and another for UK SMEs...

Before the government choose to US based services they really ought to look carefully at the legal implications of the choices they intend on making, and what this means in regards to who can see what.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/10/governments-attack-cloud-computing

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/07/doj-sues-telecom-over-nsl/