Suppliers Urged To Register For G-Cloud Part Two

Vendors have been warned they have less than two days to register for the second iteration of the government’s G-Cloud if they want their wares to appear on the CloudStore when the framework goes live this Friday.

The government’s G-Cloud Team, now led by Home Office IT director Denise McDonagh (pictured) has urged suppliers to register for the eMarketplace and then follow links through to complete registration. They need to submit their full framework agreements, or they will miss out.

There will be a suppliers webcast on 29 October to provide an overview of the G-Cloud CloudStore for suppliers.

G-Whizz for the G-Cloud!

“Work is currently going on feverishly behind the scenes both in the G-Cloud Team and Government Procurement Service to ready ourselves for the launch on the G-Cloud ii procurement on Friday 26 October,” a blog post from the team read.

The government has been eager to progress its cloud work, as many in the private sector start to embrace public, private and hybrid models.

Analysts have called on all organisations to ignore the fear, uncertainty and doubt surrounding the cloud so they don’t miss out on the manifold opportunities it offers.

IDC warned that scare stories over the Patriot Act, which would allow the US government to enter data centres to gather evidence for criminal investigations, are “fallacious”. Most major cloud providers are US-based and so could be subject to the law, even where data centres are not on US soil.

“The Patriot Act is nothing special. Indeed data stored in the US is generally better protected than in most European countries, in particular the UK,” said David Bradshaw, IDC research manager for European public cloud services.

IDC said most countries have similar legislation allowing law enforcement entry into data centres to investigate and prevent acts of terrorism.

Last week, IDC said barriers to cloud needed to be removed by governments across Europe. In a study carried out on behalf of the EU, IDC claimed policy changes could increase the value of spending on public cloud services from €35.2 billion to €77.7 billion across the continent by 2020.

The analyst firm advocated a “policy-driven” policy over one of “no intervention” towards cloud adoption.

“We estimate that the cumulative impact for the period 2015-2020 will be €940 billion in the ‘policy-driven’ scenario, compared to €357 billion in the ‘no intervention’ one,” said Giuliana Folco, research vice president at IDC.

IDC recommended EU-wide solutions for increasing cloud adoption, from harmonising data protection and privacy regulation – which the EU is already doing – to EU-wide certification of service vendors on their security and data protection arrangements.

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