Government Clouds: Are People Ready?

Andrea Di Maio
VP Distinguished Analyst Gartner

This morning, at the Gartner Symposium in Barcelona, I ran a Net IT Out session on cloud computing in government. This was meant to be a rapid fire session where an analyst briefly introduces a subject and some of the Gartner’s positions, and then leaves as much time as possible to a Q&A. The room was so packed that we had to arrange for overflow attendance outside the room, through a videolink, and the possibility for people to pose questions via Twitter. So the level of interest looked very high.  
However as I got into the Q&A session, nobody would dare asking the first one. When I then polled the audience (in the room) to know how many of them had cloud deployments in place, very few raised their hands. When questions started to come, I found that – albeit intesting and useful – they were not too dissimilar from I could have heard a year ago.

The only slight variation seems to be a greater interest and concern for the procurement side of things as opposed to “implementing” clouds, but this could be due to the spin of my introduction, where I put quite some emphasis on the importance of the former rather than the latter aspect.

There were a few interesting questions about to perform due diligence for cloud services, which also tied nicely into the procurement discussion. However the was hardly the number of questions and level of activity I would expected given how important cloud computing seems to be from most of our survey work and from the huge attendance.

After the session I had a few more exchanges about the link between the constraint of data sovereignty and the level of investment that vendors are (or are rather not) making into specific jurisdictions. My take that – given the slow market uptake – most vendors will first focus on leveraging their existing, mostly US-based infrastructure, before serving public sector needs in other countries seemed to be confirmed.

All in all, it seems to me that, while cloud computing will definitely have an impact and possibly become the primary sourcing model for many government organizations, the transition will be far slower than many think, or hope for, and certainly so in Europe.
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