HMRC is to tax OpenStack cloud with UK citizens' data Britain’s taxman has embraced OpenStack for a fledgling cross-channel digital tax service. HMRC is rolling out its vaunted multi-channel digital tax platform (MDTP) on OpenStack from relatively unknown cloud start up DataCentred. That means what was once billed as a Linux for the cloud has become the web and data centre …
Interesting to see how Datacentred passed the qualification criteria for financial stability given these accounts:
https://companycheck.co.uk/company/05611763/DATACENTRED-LTD/financial-accounts
Re: Startup_company - Company age: 10 years
https://companycheck.co.uk/company/05611763/DATACENTRED-LTD/summary
Of more concern, no mention of ISO27001, CSA Star, or any other formal accreditation around security. Would imagine that HMRC have done their due diligence, but still very unusual to see a cloud company that makes so little mention of security on their website.
Likewise, no mention of ISO27001 or security credentials within the G-Cloud service descriptions.
https://www.digitalmarketplace.service.gov.uk/g-cloud/services/7537924074015556
The MDTP itself is actually a FOGB monolithic SAP system in a secure datacentre. The OpenStack elements are for the hipsterish web APIs that sit on the front feeding gov.uk services. These have always sat in non-secure (relatively) datacentres as they're mostly stateless.
The conclusion would have been that going for a small, relatively new supplier would be an acceptable risk, because in principle one OpenStack provider can be swapped for another, and the cost of switching from OpenStack altogether is low by public sector standards.
There's also a Cloudera system in the mix for bulk analytics and suchlike. All of it puppet managed and billed by the hour etc.
Or at least that's the idea. Most of it is stuck in GDS-esque Permanent Beta Hell (mainly due to Verify being absolute pants and three years late), so the thousands of legacy physical boxes and billed-by-the-year VMs running Oracle and Oracle Related Applications are still in place for the time being.
Anon for obvious reasons.
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