Posts by andypowe11 7 publicly visible posts • joined 9 Jan 2015
Really not sure you've done your homework here? DOS5 was open to 1000s of suppliers. Look at the Digital Marketplace - https://www.digitalmarketplace.service.gov.uk/buyers/frameworks/digital-outcomes-and-specialists-5/requirements/digital-specialists - and you'll see 2896 suppliers listed in the spreadsheet. Look at https://www.digitalmarketplace.service.gov.uk/digital-outcomes-and-specialists/opportunities for the current list of opportunities.
Drawing any conclusions from G-Cloud sales data is difficult at the best of times for a number of reasons:
1) Spend numbers are largely 'self-reported'
2) Because of 1, reporting tends to lag reality such that reported sales in any given month tends to go up over time (i.e. recent months' spending tends to be under reported)
3) Reported sales of AWS and Azure may or may not reliably include sales via re-sellers and partners
4) Comparing sales of Microsoft (i.e. Azure and Office 365) against sales of AWS makes no real sense since you are not comparing like with like - if you could split out just Azure spend, then that would be a reasonable comparison with AWS spend - but I suspect that isn't possible for some of the reasons above.
As to, "why doesn't the UK gov build its own cloud?". Ha! Can you imagine. If cloud was simply a place to run VMs that might just about be a possibility. But if you think that is what cloud is, I suggest you go and look at what the likes of AWS, Azure and Google actually offer these days. There isn't a cat in hells chance of government producing anything in the same ball-park... not even on the same planet.
The question of whether it is better to put government data and services with a UK SME or a global public cloud provider is an interesting one but I don’t think that UK or non-UK ownership of the parent company has much to do with it any longer. That’s just continuing FUD. In any case, the long term ownership of whoever you choose to put your data with probably comes down at least as much to who buys them in the future as anything else.
Cost is more interesting… but if cost of storage is your driver then you may not be starting in the right place. You also need to consider breadth of functionality, long term resilience of service and various other factors. Yes, AWS and Azure pricing is complex – they are complex services with lots of flexibility… why wouldn’t the pricing be complex? You’re only going to get the most out of them by embracing that complexity and by taking advantage of the pricing and service features that allow you to control your costs sensibly. If you can’t, or won’t, do that, again, maybe public cloud isn’t for you. Which is not to suggest that doing so is trivial.
What is the story here... a pair of cheap bikes get stolen "shortly after he made his address and details of his bikes public"? Where is the evidence to link these two events? It was also presumably "shortly after he'd been seen putting his bikes away in the garage", "shortly after dark" and "shortly after umpteen other things"!
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