[LINK] itNews: 'AGIMO defends Government cloud take-up'

[Roger Clarke]

[The article below provides a useful review of the caution with which 
Clth government agencies are approaching cloud technologies.

[Any prospect of data finding its way into overseas hands is 
untenable for a wide range of data held by government agencies.  That 
rules out US companies as suppliers, or as sub-contractors, even if 
the data is stored in Australia, because US companies are subject to 
extra-territorial claims by the US government, in particular under 
the PATRIOT Act.

[Data security, integrity and availability are challenging in cloud 
architectures.  Added to that, great care must be taken to ensure 
that the addition of large numbers of extra points-of-failure into 
networks doesn't result in a significant reduction in reliability and 
accessibility.]


AGIMO defends Government cloud take-up
John Hilvert
itNews
Aug 22, 2012 2:45 PM (17 hours ago)
http://www.itnews.com.au/News/312727,agimo-defends-government-cloud-take-up.aspx

Could store citizen data in the public cloud in ten years.

The Federal Government has boasted of a strong industry response to 
its cloud computing plans, with some 200 vendors interested in its 
data centre as-a-service (DCaaS) procurement program so far.

AGIMO first assistant secretary John Sheridan refuted claims that the 
Government had taken too tentative an approach to the cloud, noting 
that its DCaaS tender documents had been downloaded 200 times since 
their release on 31 July.

Sheridan told the Technology in Government and Public Sector Summit 
last week that the Australian Government had already implemented many 
cloud technologies, highlighting virtualisation as an example.

He said large Commonwealth agencies ran 2.3 virtual servers for each 
physical server - small compared to a theoretical maximum of 60:1, 
but higher than the world average of 1.9.

Sheridan asserted that the Australian Government was closing in on 
cloud computing opportunities, noting that it had access to reliable 
high-speed networks, commodity server hardware, open web 2.0 
standards and open source technology.

Certain citizen-facing services, business process and applications 
were already hosted on virtual servers, private and "community cloud" 
infrastructure, he noted, with the latter referring to arrangements 
in which large agencies might provide cloud services to their peers.

He said those services could move to public cloud platforms in three 
to five years' time, joining some of the Government's websites, 
online channels, processing and storage on the likes of Salesforce, 
Amazon or Rackspace.

Meanwhile, citizen information would be moved to private cloud 
environments within two years, to government community clouds within 
five years, and to the public cloud within ten years, Sheridan 
predicted.

Sheridan highlighted a need for the right levels of encryption and 
service level agreements, noting that the Government sought to 
"balance the risks".

Government data also offered unique challenges in terms of the 
lengths of time it had to be maintained and accessible, he said, 
explaining that military personnel records were stored for 130 years, 
and other records stored for seven years - covering four or five 
generations of technology over that period of time.

"Sometimes Government is accused of being too conservative in moving 
this way [into cloud computing]," he said. "It's always interesting 
to get that balance right.

"We won't put all our eggs in the one cloud basket. We'll think about 
what we do. We'll carefully manage that over time."


-- 
Roger Clarke                                 http://www.rogerclarke.com/
			            
Xamax Consultancy Pty Ltd      78 Sidaway St, Chapman ACT 2611 AUSTRALIA
                    Tel: +61 2 6288 1472, and 6288 6916
mailto:Roger.Clarke at xamax.com.au                http://www.xamax.com.au/

Visiting Professor in the Faculty of Law               University of NSW
Visiting Professor in Computer Science    Australian National University