blog Cloud computing projects in the Federal Government are a little thin on the water these days, despite the fact that the previous Labor administration tried to push for further adoption in the public sector, and despite the fact that cloud is all the rage in state governments at the moment. That’s why we’re particularly interested in this little gem posted by Australian Government chief technology officer John Sheridan on his blog today. Sheridan writes:
“I would like to take this opportunity to highlight an innovation Comcare achieved through its approach of acquiring a cost effective Cloud implementation. Last year, Comcare recognised the need for a Disaster Recovery (DR) Solution and after investigation, it became clear that with the agency’s current cost constraints, a traditional data centre solution would not be viable.
Comcare approached Finance to discuss its Cloud options under the Data Centre as a Service Multi Use List (DCaaS MUL), but quickly realised that their project would not fit within the $80,000 and 12 month limitations of the MUL. Aware of their tight timeframes, but recognising the value of the DCaaS MUL, Comcare approached the market for a DR Solution in the Cloud, with a condition of participation that vendors must be an approved vendor on the DCaaS MUL.
An agreement was signed with the successful Tenderer and Comcare negotiated a Multi Agency access clause to allow other Federal Government Agencies to “piggyback” off of their agreement. This makes future procurement of similar services simpler and less time consuming which fits within the Federal Government’s policy of Smart ICT investment for agencies to share resources and achieve cost savings. For parties interested to find out more about this agreement, contact details for accessing the Standing Offer Notice SON1983902 is available on AusTender.
Congratulations to Comcare for its successful approach to market. It is encouraging to see that agencies acknowledge the value of Finance’s procurement solutions, such as the DCaaS MUL, and are seeking to leverage their benefits wherever possible.”
To my mind, what this project signals is that the standard cloud computing adoption cycle has kicked off in the Federal Government. It starts with test and development environments shifting to the cloud, and quickly progresses to include disaster recovery. Non-mission-critical workloads on Infrastructure as a Service quickly follow, and eventually you start to get niche applications delivered on a Software as a Service basis. Eventually CIOs start having to justify why new IT projects are not deployed via the cloud, as opposed to why they are. We’ve seen this cycle for many years now in the private sector, and it’s good to see it hitting the Federal Government as well.