UK.gov shakes hands on cloud agreement with 'non-cloud service provider' HPE HPE has inked a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the Cabinet Office in what the firm itself described as a "significant departure from the Cloud First policy" initially adopted by the British government in 2013. Under the framework agreement – part of the Government Cloud Computing strategy, a joint initiative between …
>we found that the Cloud First policy has strong 'brand recognition' across government and that changing its name or content would not be beneficial to users."
"We have finally realised how extortionately expensive is it to try and run your entire enterprise on AWS or Azure without rearchitecting every app you have to be cloud-native. Of course we're not actually going to give departments any money to do that.
What we're going to do instead is expand the definition of 'cloud first' to allow for 'hybrid cloud' architectures. Such as the hybrid architecture where you just bung a million quid to HPE for some DL-380s to stick in your data centre the same way you've been doing for two or three decades.
By doing it this way we get to keep 'led central government cloud adoption strategy' on our CVs for when we decide to try and fuck off to AWS in two years"
-CabO
Having seen and worked on Government IT from both inside and outside the wire, I'm still bemused why government continues to pursue using other people's IT systems (cloud). The scale of government IT is such that *if* it could get itself organised then it would be far cheaper for central government to provide appropriate IT services for all of government. But it's that "if" where things tend to die.
One government scheme that I worked on that was declared "too important" to leave to industry to manage started to founder when the civil service could not get the hang of the idea of 24/7 operations. Several key staff were single-manning their roles and were working so hard that TOIL suddenly applied and their desks were vacant for days/weeks at time. Requests to understand that each post needed at least 3 bodies to cover three 8 hour shifts were ignored. Senior civil servants argued that it was ludicrous that a small department would have three senior civil servants of the same grade (eg three data centre managers, three security managers...) and also couldn't work out that we were competing in the market for talent with big payers.
Sort out the whacky career structure and realise that renting MIPs and storage is a bad idea and they may be able to sort it out. At the moment there's insistence that they can rent *any* service followed by sick realisation that they really don't want to platform share with industry, hackers and others.
I have been working in the Govt space for quite some time and although moving to the cloud is a great idea - it forces different departments to standardise and use the same platforms (which makes support simpler and therefore cheaper) - the amount of legacy platforms that are old, bespoke and un-documented means that there will be a need for on-prem for quite some time.
I don't think this should be excuse for not modernising these systems though. The reason Govt IT is so expensive and always gets a bad press is because rather than using COTS products as they were intended, they always try to bastardise them or put limitations around them so they no longer work as intended.
Would you. It have thought Government Departments were not already using common Infrastructure and platforms after decades of
- Client Server
- Web
- Web 2.0
- Blockchain
- G-Cloud
- Virtualisation
- Cloud
- kubernetes
.. and other wanky marketing bollocks or Dev methodologies.
... eap as most of this is covered by ‘Government framework agreements’?!
This makes sense. HPE is a server company. It makes sense to be the server guy when everybody else is being the cloud guy. It's the only thing that does make sense. It's a niche, but a big enough niche. And they did it without running around saying "cloud sucks" or "cloud but" or "cloud repatriation" whatever the hell that was.
The UK move here also makes sense. Too much legacy, lower cost at scale, can be secured.
HPE's tactic of branding things that barely exist (Greenlake, Pointnext etc) is still vomit-worthy however.
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