Budget likely to increase demand for cloud services

Computing staff, Computing, Tuesday 22 June 2010 at 17:26:00

As pressure to reduce costs intensifies

With Chancellor George Osborne?s announcement that there will be an increase
in savings expected from each government department, commentators are arguing
that the IT industry will begin to see significant traction in the move towards
cloud services.

The savings expected from each government department has increased from 20
per cent over a four-year period under Gordon Brown?s government to 25 per cent
over the same period under the coalition, according to today's emergency Budget.
More specific details on how departments will meet these savings will be
released in the annual spending review on 20 October.

This puts more pressure on the public sector to provide the same services or
similar for even less money, and arguably these savings can best be achieved by
adopting cloud services.

Sarah Burnett, senior analyst at Ovum, said: ?Cloud computing is set for a
boost following today?s emergency budget. In fact, the Budget could well turn
out to be among the best things to happen to cloud computing in the UK public
sector. It is likely to bring it to the top of the list of how to cut IT
budgets."

In a similar vein, Dave Baldwin, managing director of ICT specialist
Getronics, said: ?With huge budget cuts across the board, public sector
organisations need to utilise cloud-based services to cut costs and deliver
efficiencies. By switching to a hosted desktop environment, department heads can
make these savings through leaner and more flexible services, instead of relying
on rigid and costly on-site IT.?

Finally, in a recent interview with Computing, KPMG?s Global IT
Advisory partner Bryan Cruickshank said: "Advances in technology have made a
variety of low-cost options available. New sourcing strategies such as the cloud
give CIOs a wider range of options in terms of technologies that enable low-cost
services."

in recent weeks senior CIOs across government have indictated
their
belief that the G-Cloud will be the most transformative of all government IT
initiatives.

Full story at http://www.computing.co.uk/computing/news/2265270/budget-likely-increase-demand