Everyone wants to move to the cloud these days, but for government organizations it isn’t always just about saving money. Questions arise like:
- Where is the data stored? What about privacy? Is our data subject to things like the Patriot Act (if you are not a US organization)?
- Who is working with our data? Are we in effect outsourcing high tech jobs to other jurisdictions? Who doesn’t remember (if you are Canadian) the outcry when the public realized that the Canadian flag pins were not, in fact, made in Canada.
Given this backdrop, I have a radical suggestion. Let’s take a look a the word Cloud and change it to something Governments understand well.
Cloud = Shared Service
Governments know how to do shared services. This is just shared services on a larger scale and across governments, perhaps. Governments already have data centres, so really we are talking about an optimization problem. What about something like this?
- Outsource existing data centres to a management organization (Note I say data centres for to allow for regional distribution and disaster recovery services)
- Allow that management organization to provide services to other government organizations that are subject to same privacy and data security regulations
- Define a revenue/cost model that works for all parties
And voila. You have a government based shared service (Cloud) that meets the specific needs of government organizations, utilizes resources efficiently, probably keeps jobs locally (provided management organization is local) and overall reduces cost.
Too radical?