Archivo de la categoría: Public Sector

Big Data, David Stokes, Europe, IBM, Jo Johnson, News & Analysis, Public Sector, STFC, uk government

IBM, UK gov ink $313m deal to promote big data, cognitive compute research

IBM and the UK government are pouring £313m into big data and cognitive computing R&D

IBM and the UK government are pouring £313m into big data and cognitive computing R&D

The UK government has signed a deal with IBM that will see the two parties fund a series of initiatives aimed at expanding cognitive computing and big data research.

The £313m partnership will see the UK government commit £113m to expand the Hartree Centre at Daresbury, a publicly funded facility geared towards reducing the cost and improving the efficiency and user-friendliness of high performance computing and big data for research and development purposes.

IBM said it will further support the project with technology and onsite expertise worth up to £200m, including access to the company’s cognitive computing platform Watson. The company will also place 24 IBM researchers at the Centre, who will help the researchers commercialise any promising innovations developed there.

The organisations will also explore how to leverage OpenPower-based systems for high performance computing.

“We live in an information economy – from the smart devices we use every day to the super-computers that helped find the Higgs Boson, the power of advanced computing means we now have access to vast amounts of data,” said UK Minister for Universities and Science Jo Johnson.

“This partnership with IBM, which builds on our £113 million investment to expand the Hartree Centre, will help businesses make the best use of big data to develop better products and services that will boost productivity, drive growth and create jobs.”

David Stokes, chief executive for IBM in the UK and Ireland said: “We’re at the dawn of a new era of cognitive computing, during which advanced data-centric computing models and open innovation approaches will allow technology to greatly augment decision-making capabilities for business and government.”

“The expansion of our collaboration with STFC builds upon Hartree’s successful engagement with industry and its record in commercialising technological developments, and provides a world-class environment using Watson and OpenPower technologies to extend the boundaries of Big Data and cognitive computing,” he added.

G-Cloud, Nicky Stewart, Opinion, Public Sector, Skyscape, uk government

G-Cloud: Much has been achieved, but the programme still needs work

The UK government is ahead of the curve in cloud, but work still needs doing

The UK government is ahead of the curve in cloud, but work still needs doing

Thanks to G-Cloud, the once stagnant public sector IT marketplace that was dominated by a small number of large incumbent providers, is thriving. More and more SMEs are listing their assured cloud services on the framework, which is driving further competition and forcing down costs for public sector organisations, ultimately benefitting each and every UK tax payer.  But the programme still needs work.

G-Cloud initially aimed to achieve annual savings of more than £120m and to account for at least half of all new central Government spend by this year. The Government Digital Service has already estimated that G-Cloud is yielding efficiencies of at least 50 per cent, comfortably exceeding the initial target set when the Government’s Cloud Strategy was published in 2011.

According to the latest figures, the total reported G-Cloud sales to date have now exceeded £591m, with 49 per cent of total sales by value and 58 per cent by volume, having been awarded to SMEs. 76 per cent of total sales by value were through central Government; 24 per cent through the wider public sector, so while significant progress has been made, more work is clearly needed to educate local Government organisations on the benefits of G-Cloud and assured cloud services.

To provide an example of the significant savings achieved by a public sector organisation following a move to the cloud, the DVLA’s ‘View driving record’ platform, hosted on GOV.UK, secured online access to driving records for up to 40 million drivers for the insurance industry, which it is hoped will help to reduce premiums. Due to innovative approaches including cloud hosting, the DVLA managed to save 66 per cent against the original cost estimate.

Contracts held within the wider public sector with an estimated total value of over £6bn are coming to an end.  Therefore continued focus must be placed on disaggregating large contracts to ensure that all digital and ICT requirements that can be based on the cloud are based on the cloud, and sourced from the transparent and vendor-diverse Government Digital Marketplace.

Suppliers, especially SMEs and new players who don’t have extensive networks within the sector, also need much better visibility of downstream opportunities. Currently, G-Cloud is less transparent than conventional procurements in this respect, where pre-tender market engagements and prior information notices are now commonplace and expected.

However, where spend controls cannot be applied, outreach and education must accelerate, and G-Cloud terms and conditions must also meet the needs of the wider public sector. The G-Cloud two year contract term is often cited as a reason for not procuring services through the framework, as is the perceived inability for buyers to incorporate local, but mandatory terms and conditions.

The Public Contracts Regulations 2015 introduced a number of changes to EU procurement regulations, and implemented the Lord Young reforms, which aim to make public procurements more accessible and less onerous for SMEs. These regulations provide new opportunities for further contractual innovation, including (but not limited to) dynamic purchasing systems, clarification of what a material contract change means in practice, and giving buyers the ability to take supplier performance into account when awarding a contract.

The G-Cloud Framework terms and conditions must evolve to meet the needs of the market as a whole, introducing more flexibility to accommodate complex legacy and future requirements, and optimising the opportunities afforded by the new public contract regulations. The introduction of the Experian score as the sole means of determining a supplier’s financial health in the G-Cloud 6 Framework is very SME unfriendly, and does not align to the Crown Commercial Service’s own policy on evaluation of financial stability. The current drafting needs to be revisited for G-Cloud 7.

As all parts of the public sector are expected to be subject to ongoing fiscal pressure, and because digitising public services will continue to be a focus for the new Conservative Government, the wider public sector uptake of G-Cloud services must continue to be a priority. Looking to the future of G-Cloud, the Government will need to put more focus on educating buyers on G-Cloud procurement, the very real opportunities that G-Cloud can bring, underlined by the many success stories to date, and ensuring the framework terms and conditions are sufficiently flexible to support the needs of the entire buying community. G-Cloud demonstrates the possibilities when Government is prepared to be radical and innovative and in order to build on the significant progress that has been made, we hope that G-Cloud will be made a priority over the next five years.

Written by Nicky Stewart, commercial director at Skyscape Cloud Services

Alex Hilton, APM Group, Cloud Industry Forum, cloud standards, ENISA, Enterprise IT, European Commission, News & Analysis, Public Sector, Richard Pharro

CIF cloud code of practice gains European Commission backing

The Cloud Industry Forum's COP gained the EC's seal of approval for cloud certification this week

The Cloud Industry Forum’s COP gained the EC’s seal of approval for cloud certification this week

The Cloud Industry Forum’s (CIF) code of practice for cloud service providers has been added to the European Commission’s growing list of cloud certification schemes. The move means it passes the EC’s benchmark for service security and reliability.

The Commission’s Cloud Certification Schemes List was set up as part of the European Cloud Strategy and developed by the European Union Agency for Network and Information Security (ENISA); it gives an overview of different existing certification schemes for cloud services in the region.

The scheme effectively the Commission’s way of recognising a certification’s claim to ensuring cloud contracts guarantee a certain level of security or reliability, which it hopes will assure European customers of a provider’s claims and help stimulate spending on cloud services.

“This is a major milestone for the Cloud Industry Forum and the broader cloud community.  There are no dedicated cloud standards in the market, making it difficult for small business customers to identify trusted advisors,” said Alex Hilton, chief executive officer of the Cloud Industry Forum.

“We hope this recognition will encourage more users of cloud services to actively seek providers that are CIF-certified, and likewise more CSPs to seek certification. We have taken important steps in providing a foundation in what is a fast changing and, to many, a new technology sector,” Hilton said.

Other certification schemes included in the list include the Cloud Security Alliance’s attestation, certification and self assessment, EuroCloud’s Star Audit, ISO 27001 and PCI v3.

Richard Pharro, chief executive of APM Group, the Cloud Industry Forum’s certification partner, added: “The Code of Practice was first established with the aim of driving levels of accountability, capability and transparency in the Cloud industry, which are all critical to the Cloud service contract. With the adoption of Cloud within businesses progressing at an incredibly fast rate, those key tenets of Cloud delivery are as important as ever.”

“CSPs need to ensure they operate their businesses and services in a fully open and transparent manner where it is clear to their customers – existing and new – that they are trustworthy and capable of offering the services they claim to be able to offer. The CIF CoP is one of very few schemes which offers this much needed reassurance to end users regarding the organisations they choose to work with,” he added.

Aaron Levie, Box, federal government, News & Analysis, Public Sector, Sonny Hashmi, US Department of Justice

US Department of Justice taps Box for file sharing and collaboration

The US DoJ is deploying Box as the company pushes forward in the public sector

The US DoJ is deploying Box as the company pushes forward in the public sector

The US Department of Justice is deploying Box in a bid to improve content sharing and collaboration. The company also said it will shortly receive Agency Authorization to Operate, which means the solution can be deployed across all DoJ agencies.

The DoJ said it is deploying Box to simplify internal and external collaboration between other federal government agencies and third-party organisations, improve support of mobile devices for content sharing and collaboration, and reduce its increasingly fragmented landscape of document storage and the tools used to manage content.

“There is an increasing need to securely connect and enable processes across agencies and jurisdictions as well as to connect government employees with their data, content, and stakeholders,” said Aaron Levie co-founder and chief executive officer at Box.

“Innovative government agencies, like DOJ, are deeply committed to leveraging emerging cloud technologies to better serve the American people, while ensuring the security and privacy of sensitive information. We are thrilled to support the DOJ’s technology efforts, helping to transform the way they manage and share information,” Levie said.

Box said it has over 40 federal government customers, over 34 million users and 45,000 organisations globally using its service, and the company is planning a big push into the public sector. The company recently brought on Sonny Hashmi, former chief information officer for the US General Services Administration to help it penetrate further into the public sector, and it is also currently pursuing FedRAMP compliance in a bid to certify the service for use across all US federal government agencies.

Enterprise IT, federal government, IBM, News & Analysis, Public Sector, US Army

US Army deploys hybrid cloud for logistics data analysis

The US Army is working with IBM to deploy a hybrid cloud platform to support its logistics system

The US Army is working with IBM to deploy a hybrid cloud platform to support its logistics system

The US Army is partnering with IBM to deploy a hybrid cloud platform to support data warehousing and data analysis for its Logistics Support Activity (LOGSA) platform, the Army’s logistics support service.

LOGSA provides logistics information capabilities through analytics tools and BI solutions to acquire, manage, equip and sustain the materiel needs of the organisation, and is also the home of the Logistics Information Warehouse (LIW), the Army’s official data system for collecting, storing, organizing and delivering logistics data.

The Army said it is working with IBM to deploy LOGSA, which IBM said it is the US federal government’s largest logistics system, on an internal hybrid cloud platform in a bid to improve its ability to connect to other IT systems, broaden the organisation’s analytics capabilities, and save money (the Army reckons up to 50 per cent).

Anne Altman, General Manager for U.S. Federal at IBM said: “The Army not only recognized a trend in IT that could transform how they deliver services to their logistics personnel around the world, they also implemented a cloud environment quickly and are already experiencing significant benefits. They’re taking advantage of the inherent benefits of hybrid cloud: security and the ability to connect it with an existing IT system. It also gives the Army the flexibility to incorporate new analytics services and mobile capabilities.”

data privacy, data protection, Microsoft, News & Analysis, Public Sector

Microsoft, civil liberties renew calls for Patriot Act reform

Microsoft and close to 50 tech companies and civil liberties assocaitions have renewed calls to reform the US Patriot Act ahead of the expiry of the law's provisions governing bulk data collection

Microsoft and close to 50 tech companies and civil liberties associations have renewed calls to reform the US Patriot Act ahead of the expiry of the law’s provisions governing bulk data collection

Microsoft, along with nearly fifty other technology civil rights associations and technology firms have signed an open letter to senior members of the US government calling for reform of the Patriot Act, a cause célèbre for Microsoft among other cloud firms in recent years.

Microsoft has previously criticised the US government’s bulk data collection practices, and the ability of its authorities to act on warrants beyond US soil (particularly when such acts contradict local laws where those businesses operate).

In an open letter to very senior members of the US government including Michael Rogers, director of the NSA, senate minority leader Harry Reid, and US president Barack Obama, the organisations reaffirm the need to end the US government’s bulk data collection practices, and make government and corporate reporting on any Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court decisions more transparent.

The US Patriot Act Section 215, which currently serves as the legal basis for the NSA’s bulk collection of metadata, is due to expire in June this year.

“We the undersigned represent a wide range of privacy and human rights advocates, technology companies, and trade associations that hold an equally wide range of positions on the issue of surveillance reform. Many of us have differing views on exactly what reforms must be included in any bill reauthorizing USA Patriot Act Section 215,” the letter reads.

“That said, our broad, diverse, and bipartisan coalition believes that the status quo is untenable and that it is urgent that Congress move forward with reform.”

“It has been nearly two years since the first news stories revealed the scope of the United States’ surveillance and bulk collection activities. Now is the time to take on meaningful legislative reforms to the nation’s surveillance programs that maintain national security while preserving privacy, transparency, and accountability.”

Microsoft is among a range of technology companies in support of reforming how American legal entities treat data, both within the context of surveillance activities or general legal proceedings. But US lawmakers have signaled they are prepared to act on longstanding promises to reform the legal landscape. Last month American lawmakers introduced two bipartisan bills that seek to limit the reach of US courts over data stored in cloud services located outside the US, a move welcomed by a broad coalition of technology and telecoms firm – including Microsoft.

Europe, HP, News & Analysis, OpenStack, Public Sector, Xavier Poisson

HP, EC launch public sector cloud pilots in several European cities

The EC is working with HP to bring cloud to municipal governments in Europe

The EC is working with HP to bring cloud to municipal governments in Europe

HP announced it is working with the European Commission on several pilot cloud implementations in a bid to test how internal and citizen-facing public sector services cloud be moved off legacy platforms into more elastic cloud environments. The move is part of the Commission’s broader efforts to catalyse the use of cloud services in the public sector.

HP is working with the EC on the organisation’s ironically-named STORM (Surfing Towards the Opportunity of Real Migration) cloud project, which envisions the establishment of a public services cloud that allows services and data to be securely shared between the public and private sector partners.

The project currently includes three HP-led trials in Valladolid, Spain; Águeda, Portugal; and Thessaloniki, Greece. As part of the initiative HP is defining, designing and implementing an OpenStack-based infrastructure-as-a-service platform.

The initial stage of the project will see Valladolid pilot Urbanismo en Red, an application that gives citizens access to municipal development plans online. Thessaloniki will trial Virtual City Marketplace, a portal to buy and sell local services, while Agueda aims to increase public participation by allowing citizens and communities to express their opinion online and submit ideas for urban improvements.

The goal, the company said, is to accelerate the “cloudification” of public services in Europe, and to fine-tune and seed out a cloud platform model that can be replicated in other cities in Europe.

“Europe must ensure that new IT devices, applications, data repositories and services interact seamlessly anywhere – just like the Internet,” says Xavier Poisson Gouyou Beauchamps, vice president, cloud computing EMEA, HP.

“This project aims to make collaboration between public authorities easier and more cost effective through the sharing and re-use of common platforms, components and infrastructures. As a result, municipalities across the EU will take a step closer to becoming truly ‘smart cities’.”

“HP is working closely with the EU across a number of projects tied to accountability, security and compliance in order to accelerate digital growth in Europe,” he added.