The plan for public sector data center consolidation, if it exists, does not appear to be under the responsibility of any single government department. What appears to be the case is the idea of shared infrastructure – that is, multiple government departments, universities, or local government authorities operating through consolidated data centers.

The problem, as ever, is deciding who will take the lead. This particular turf war has yet to be resolved, and the choosing of a lead authority is a serious barrier to adoption of shared data centers.

While basic problems such as this remain unresolved, the government continues to propose ideas such as its G-Cloud initiative. This has been criticised by industry experts who fear it may comprise of nothing more than a portfolio of soundbites.

There is little evidence that anyone in government has any tangible ideas for its data center strategy, and this has worried many people in the industry.

Recently, DatacenterDynamics.com reported that within the Digital Britain report, the government had promised a ‘strategy study’ which mooted that a ‘route map’ might be created, which would steer the public sector towards a G-Cloud.

This has provoked a concerned response from data center experts. Some complain the nebulous plans might indicate that public sector data center strategy lacks any tangible direction. If the government were a football team, the accusation chanted by its data center supporters might be that they ‘don’t know what they’re not yet doing’.

The report might make noises about reducing waste, but it is better to judge the government by its actions, argued Dominick Monkhouse, managing director of hosting company Peer 1. He has condemned recent public sector projects as a disastrous waste of money.

North Bristol NHS Trust – one of the largest NHS Trusts in the country – announced the construction of a new £5m data center. The NextiraOne-built center will host data relating to 300,000 outpatients and 100,000 inpatients for a teaching trust hospital, with links to both Bristol universities with about 8,500 staff members.

“Frankly, it’s astonishing,” said Monkhouse. “Anyone with any common sense in IT knows that building a bespoke data center is not cost-efficient. Particularly if you are a public sector organisation. Still, it’s only taxpayer’s money,” he said.

Although as a hosting provider Monkhouse has a vested interest, his point that anything built by the public sector is more expensive does highlight the lack of coherence in the government when it comes to data centers.

Building a data center is a highly specialist and expensive undertaking.

With thousands of under-occupied data centers across the country, the G-Cloud strategy should take advantage of this cheap capacity. To do otherwise is to go against the principles of cloud computing.

“This route avoids capex and provides flexibility and scalability on a pay-as-yougrow basis,” said Monkhouse. “Owning your own data center cannot possibly deliver those benefits. Economies of scale mean a professional data center organisation provides a much more costeffective solution.”

Sarah Burnett, senior researcher at analyst the Butler Group defended the NHS’s inhouse approach. “If it rents the capacity, would it be secure?” said Burnett. However, she said that government strategy could profitably use secure hosts. “The concept of using spare capacity is correct, and we should all think that way.”

SECURITY CONCERNS
After the recent mainstream media coverage that greeted the idea of patient records being stored in Google or Microsoft data centers, it is obvious that government data center security could be a political hot potato in years to come.

Martin Vickery, Spirent Communications marketing manager, says procurement mistakes will be pounced on, but security will be an even bigger concern for the government. “Fewer data centers and growing volumes of data will just mean bigger data movements, bigger data losses and diminishing public trust,” he said. The public sector has inherent problems that need to be addressed, argued Paul Wooding, head of public sector at NetApp. “There are systemic problems with the way in which government stores and accesses data, and ultimately it is information governance and the government’s information management policies that are both the weakness and opportunity here,” he said.

This is a massive architectural challenge, he warned, and it is made worse as the entire IT industry approaches it with a vested interest. “Unless the government is prepared to approach its designs from a first principles basis, it will never overcome the legacy and inadequacies of first-generation system components that are still holding data today,” said Wooding.

But who in government has the knowledge to make an unbiased, informed choice?

“At 50,000 feet the government’s goal makes perfect sense, but many government departments are so far from being able to migrate to shared infrastructure that moving to it is, at best, an aspiration right now, and a pipe dream at worst,” said analyst Gary Barnett, a partner at The Bathwick Group. “Many public sector organisations need help in counting the number of servers they have, let alone getting onto the cloud.”