Multiple billions up for grabs as UK government launches cloud services tenders UK government has launched two tenders for cloud services that could jointly see up to £7.5 billion ($9.5 billion) spent under framework agreements. The Crown Commercial Service, the Cabinet Office's buying arm, has launched the competition for G-Cloud 14 Lots 1-3, a framework deal for cloud hosting available to a wide range …
I run an app on my computer that I got created about 20 years ago (LOL so it's got no AI) and it continually pops "graffiti" onto the display every few minutes and often makes me compare today to the past - when I collected all the graffiti quotes. So I just updated an original Brendan Behan quote that just showed up so that it now describes today's world;
"Ninety-seven saint days a year wouldn't affect politics, but two AI's would ruin it."
Can we go back to filing cabinets and paper yet?
You can buy a lot of filing cabinets and employ a lot of secretaries for 6.5 Billion, and they just might do a better job of not selling private data and government secrets to whoever wants it.
So they lose control over the data they process (the assumption commonly being that the 'cloud' provider will perform the necessary resilience and security). Unfortunately, evidence shows that's not always the case. Plus, they forget that even if these functions are outsourced successfully, the buck still stops where it always did when the accident happens.
Unless there's a real need for dynamic scalability (that's always been the major benefit of 'cloud') the main reason for transitioning must be the misapprehension that it'll be cheaper than on-prem. In the long run, that's not the case. And if you strip your IT team as part of the deal, you'll eventually find out they weren't redundant after all, as it's impossible to have the necessary finger on the pulse to the same degree when everything's remote. But by then you'll be locked in so it'll be very hard to unwind -- often, even to migrate to an alternative cloud provider.
Oh I dunno!
Just come across yet another new client who whose IT director locked their company in a five-year internet and phones deal with a con com..... sorry, that should say a 'comms' company. They now can't get out of it but just before she left she renewed it for another five-years.
It was eye-wateringly expensive so they reckon she was getting a very good taste.
"Unless there's a real need for dynamic scalability (that's always been the major benefit of 'cloud') the main reason for transitioning must be the misapprehension that it'll be cheaper than on-prem."
Imagine explaining the complexities of creating and running big IT systems to an elderly relative who is hard of hearing, not very interested, and has no technical knowledge. Now imagine all the big decisions of government are taken by them. That's roughly where UK government is.
In the Department of Science, Innovation & Technology the Secretary of State holds a BA in History and Politics. Her junior ministers have degrees in Social & Political "Sciences", Law, a BA in French & German, and (possibly) Economics. Total science & technology education, nil. Cabinet Office, who have more of a say in IT related decisions have the PM (a Philosophy, politics & economics dosser), and the junior ministers have qualification in Law, and Modern History.
There's nobody in the executive branch of government understands anything about IT. However, they all believe as a matter of religion that "public sector = bad", "private sector = good".
we have a pretty new DC (about 4 years old) not much in it now but the business still presses on with sticking stuff in the cloud, mainly lift and shift VM's so the worst kind of migration! I'm fed up of saying leave it on prem, the DC still needs to be serviced and maintained whether its full or nearly empty, most of the costs of running the DC are pretty much the same full or empty a part from electric! We've migrated some VM's that now cost us upwards of £5k a year to run in the cloud that previously worked very well on prem for the grand total of next to feck all!
"We've migrated some VM's that now cost us upwards of £5k a year to run in the cloud that previously worked very well on prem for the grand total of next to feck all!"
Along with Birmingham CC, a whole litany of public and private tech disasters your microcosm shows we technologists have failed. Everyone who reads this site is a technologist in some form. Yet despite everything we know collectively, which is a fucking vast resource of tens of thousands of years of hard won experience we have precisely zero influence on government policy or bad corporate decisions. In that world it's all buzzword bingo driven by clowns with qualifications in shite like philosophy, economics or history, mal-influenced by slimey sales droids with mongo job titles and huge bonuses.
How did it come to this? At what point did we all hide our light under the bushel, or retire to the server cupboard with the Maplin catalogue?
And more importantly, is there any way that people who know stuff can reclaim the agenda from the clowns that know stuff all?
People have wrong assumption that government works for the greater good.
No. You elect people who managed to trick you.
Those people then use gained power to get further influence, wealth and then fight to get more for themselves, their families and friends.
They absolutely don't care what technologists say, unless it is critical to the national security or their re-election prospects.
Brown envelope can beat any good hearted and sound advice.
If you don't have money, you can't take policymakers to private island and show them good time, swell their offshore bank accounts, get their families on non-executive directorships etc, then forget about "reclaiming the agenda".
because some halfwit talked up the cloud and persuaded the business in to thinking it was a good idea to move to the cloud, this was 6 or 7 years ago. We now blindly, against all logic and advice given by SMEs continue down that path of moving totally unsuitable workloads in to the cloud, workloads that work fine on prem and cost effectively nothing. Being a very pragmatic person it really boils my pi$$, run stuff where its best to run it don't follow the dogmatic thinking just because someone 7 years ago said so
allow for up to 36 months with an optional 12-month extension.
Given that you can't just move services from one provider to another either the "winner" will have de facto permanent contract or there will be another contract for migration to yet another provider... and so forth.
At least tax payer will know their hard earned money is up in the clouds somewhere.
That said, surely there should be some sort of investigation why cloud is needed in the first place and why nothing is being done to have services set up on premise or at very least run by British company that pays taxes.
"UK government has launched two tenders for cloud services"
Well, there's a nice fat envelope for Capita,Palantir, and...maybe not Fujitsu as they're on the naughty step. Does Infosys have a finger in this pie too?
"that could jointly see up to £7.5 billion"
That's a ridiculous amount of money to piss up the wall on "some terribly important thing" that will be years late, an order of magnitude over budget, and might if we're lucky do about a quarter of the things it's supposed to do.
The government can come up with 7.5B for that, but paying teaching assistants / junior doctors (etc etc etc) is somehow too hard. Fixing basic infrastructure (crumbling schools/hospitals/roads) is somehow too hard. Yet this? Fuck's sake.
It's all a ruse...the government has finally heard about Bitcoin so they want to setup massive warehouses in places like Sunderland to put the miners back to work. They'll all be down't dark net wit packet ponies.
We're going to need a modern day Fred Dibner in about 50 years to do a TV series about fixing up old steam powered bitcoin mining kit and climbing up old Victorian block chains.
It could be used to convert even more local empty retail space into local datacentres and create an even more resilient distributed infrastructure.
Massive cloud contracts and massive centralised datacentre projects are basically the same thing as far as I am concerned. We need more "local" datacentres...then we don't need "the cloud" or "massive state of the art datacentres" because the country becomes the cloud with ingress and egress in every town and localised CDNs that local authorities control...giving voting power to locals over the control of their data...current incumbent wants to sell the data? Fuck him/her/schlim/schler/them/it off.
Ok, I'll throw my hat in the ring...let me do some quick maths before I quote you for the job...
...carry the 3...add the VAT...factor in the outsourcing...6 hours a day of meetings for 3 years...
3 Dell Optiplex machines...for billions of pounds I can do 3 Dell Optiplex machines.
That's massive value for money compared to other quotes they'll get.
The productivity will be massive...9 civil servants can work shifts round the clock smashing F5 to watch their pension balance go up in Edge with 3 Optiplex machines.
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