Enterprise IT, Featured, Features - Monday, April 15, 2013 12:25 - 4 Comments

Why CIOs should be cloud brokers, not blockers

The following article is the transcript of a speech given by Australian Government chief technology officer John Sheridan to a conference entitled “Tomorrow Ready CIO” in Canberra. It covers the developing use of cloud computing by the Australian Government and the measures undertaken by the Department of Finance and Deregulation to provide guidance and procurement support for agencies using the cloud. Sheridan’s major point is the need for CIOs to be brokers, not blockers, of cloud services. A view of the presentation, with short slide annotations can be found here. Sheridan welcomes comments on the speech.

It recently appeared on the blog of the Australian Government Information Management Office under a Creative Commons licence.

analysis In 2008 the government contracted Sir Peter Gershon to do a review of IT across the government, and many of you will have been involved in aspects of that, and know some of the outcomes. Sir Peter made seven recommendations, the one I want to concentrate on today is the recommendation about the Data Centre Strategy.

Our figures show that at the time we were spending some $870 million a year on data centres, and those data centres ranged, as you would appreciate, from very small data centres, maybe a server under a desk perhaps in some agencies, to very large purpose built data centres. Some were outsourced, some were insourced, there’s a whole range of expenditure.

Sir Peter suggested that if we did nothing new over the next ten to 15 years, we would probably incur an additional billion dollars in costs that we would otherwise be able to avoid. So his recommendation was that we do some work in trying to avoid a billion dollars in costs between 2010 and 2025.

The government then developed a Data Centre Strategy which was launched in March 2010, and that Strategy contained a range of actions. I’ll talk about those in a moment. First, please note that a billion dollars’ worth of avoided costs and $3.50 will get a cappuccino. The important thing about avoiding costs is that is money that the government hasn’t given you and doesn’t need to. It’s not about savings, which is a different arrangement. It’s about doing things so you don’t need to spend money, and it can be put to other uses. Continue…