Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude revealed the government's expected savings from the G-Cloud project for the first time in response to a question posed by Labour MP Michael Dugher in the House of Commons.
Maude also revealed that the cost of the G-Cloud framework, and the associated CloudStore, had cost £4.93m to implement.
Maude did not give a timeframe for the expected savings, and so it is not apparent whether the figure he gave is a one-off, or will take place over a period of time with further savings expected down the line.
The G-Cloud programme was established by the Cabinet Office to bring a broader range of cloud computing suppliers to the government market and increase the flexibility of procurement contracts.
The front-end of the G-Cloud is the CloudStore, an online marketplace hosted by Microsoft Azure, currently offering the public sector 1,700 services such as email, word processing, system hosting and enterprise resource planning.
Chris Chant, who led and developed the G-Cloud programme for the government, retired on Friday, and passed the reigns to Denise McDonagh, who is currently the head of IT at the Home Office.
The next versions of the G-Cloud framework and the CloudStore are expected to be released by the government later this month. Updates will allow suppliers and services to be added to the store on a bi-monthly basis.
Maude also said that the government will soon provide an update on its datacentre consolidation progress. The progress will be published alongside the ICT Strategy annual update report, he added.
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Autor(en)/Author(s): Rosalie Marshall
Quelle/Source: V3.co.uk, 01.05.2012
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