[LINK] Qld govt moving to the cloud

[Tom Worthington]

On 31/05/13 11:14, Jan Whitaker wrote:

> I'll give them the benefit of the doubt on a proper risk assessment ...

If the Queensland government moved its IT to a smaller number of 
consolidated servers, that would be fine. They would need several 
locations, for redundancy. It would much simpler if these were in 
Queensland, so that they were subject to local law and the service can't 
be interrupted by loss of a international link.

Most savings would come from replacing the servers in smaller agencies. 
It does not much matter if the service is run by the government or a 
contracted company. This could be a traditional computer bureau service, 
having it in "the cloud" would provide few benefits.

What would be a worry is if the servers were in another country, with 
different laws and on the end of a link which could be severed. It must 
be assumed that the intelligence agencies of that nation would have 
access to the data and would pass anything relevant on to their 
corporations, for example when negotiating mining leases with the 
Queensland government.


-- 
Tom Worthington FACS CP, TomW Communications Pty Ltd. t: 0419496150
PO Box 13, Belconnen ACT 2617, Australia  http://www.tomw.net.au
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Adjunct Senior Lecturer, Research School of Computer Science,
Australian National University http://cs.anu.edu.au/courses/COMP7310/