{"id":41748,"date":"2021-02-02T09:47:24","date_gmt":"2021-02-02T09:47:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/?guid=f706bb13e3b1bb4e10ce752fcdca0002"},"modified":"2021-02-02T09:47:24","modified_gmt":"2021-02-02T09:47:24","slug":"row-breaks-out-over-uk-govs-dependence-on-aws","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/row-breaks-out-over-uk-govs-dependence-on-aws\/","title":{"rendered":"Row breaks out over UK gov’s “dependence” on AWS"},"content":{"rendered":"


\n Bobby Hellard<\/a><\/span>
\n <\/span><\/p>\n

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2 Feb, 2021<\/span><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n

\n<\/a><\/p>\n

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A row has reportedly broken out within the government over cloud computing contracts given to Amazon.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Around \u00a375 million worth of contracts for web hosting, software and support services were awarded to\u00a0Amazon Web Services<\/a>\u00a0(AWS) last year, according to\u00a0The Telegraph<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\nThat’s reportedly almost double the amount of the next cloud-provider, French firm Capgemini, which was awarded \u00a342 million. This has started to create a divide within the Tory party with some concerned that the government\u00a0is too dependent on one service.<\/p>\n

Speaking at a\u00a0UKCloud<\/a>\u00a0roundtable, Conservative life peer, Lord Holmes, said the tech giant represented \u00a0“the latest iteration of the biggest player”, adding that\u00a0in regards to cloud procurement, it was being allowed to “eat the largest piece of pie”.<\/p>\n

Lord Maude, the former minister for the Cabinet Office, also spoke out about the AWS contracts.\u00a0<\/p>\n

“When it comes to hosting, we’ve regressed into allowing a small group, and one vendor, in particular, to dominate,” he said, according to\u00a0The Telegraph<\/em>. “If you take a view of the government as simply as a customer, it makes absolutely no sense for the government to be overly dependent on one supplier. No one would sensibly do that.”<\/p>\n

AWS\u00a0is\u00a0only directly responsible for less than 1% of what the UK’s public sector spends on IT, but it generates around \u00a38.7 billion in economic value. The firm is the biggest global provider by market share and recent\u00a0research from Canalys<\/a>\u00a0suggested it received more business spend in Q3 of 2020 (32%) than its two closest rivals Microsoft (19%) and\u00a0Google Cloud (7%).\u00a0<\/p>\n

Some have pointed out that the likes of AWS are actually helping smaller UK businesses to win government contracts. According to Daniel Korski, co-founder of\u00a0GovTech firm Public<\/a>, it is actually helping power some of the most exciting and creative businesses in the country.\u00a0
\n\u00a0
\n“It’s tempting to set up large US cloud providers against small UK startups,” Korski said. “But that totally misses what’s actually going on. Major cloud providers are enabling a new generation of British startups to bid for government contracts as they provide a secure platform to deliver services which government trusts. Before them, startups had few chances of offering products to the government.”\u00a0
\n\u00a0
\nIt is also worth noting that\u00a0AWS recently signed a Memorandum of Understanding<\/a>\u00a0with the government to provide digital skills across the civil service and actually increase the diversity of its suppliers by helping smaller businesses to take part in these types of public sector contract.\u00a0
\n\u00a0
\nThe government has also put strategies in\u00a0place that prevents dependence on one supplier, in the form of a green paper published in\u00a0December<\/a>.\u00a0However, there should also be no “outright protectionism”, according to Robert Colvile, director of the Centre for Policy Studies think tank, where gov isn’t\u00a0“buying British\u00a0purely for the sake of it”.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

“When you look at how important cloud computing has been to the rollout of the furlough scheme, or the expansion of Universal Credit, or the NHS’s response to the pandemic, it’s clear that the priority – as with all our procurement – should be to get the best quality at the best price,”\u00a0he said. <\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Bobby Hellard<\/p>\n

2 Feb, 2021 <\/p>\n

A row has reportedly broken out within the government over cloud computing contracts given to Amazon.\u00a0
\nAround \u00a375 million worth of contracts for web hosting, software and support services were a…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":403,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-41748","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41748","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/403"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=41748"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41748\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":41749,"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41748\/revisions\/41749"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=41748"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=41748"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=41748"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}