Co-CEO of Outsourcery Piers Linney explains: “Highlighting cost savings is great. However, IT decision-makers are also looking at business performance and what they can achieve within their financial limitations. While cost is of course a key feature, there needs to be a lot more work undertaken to show that local government objectives are more easily achieved by using the cloud.
“A new wave of service collaboration is developing in local government and an essential part of this will be making sure that data is used and shared in the most effective way. For example, combining social services from more than one local authority means bringing together a lot of back office data and information, enabling it to be used in different ways. CloudStore is the most effective way for local authorities to develop these types of initiatives.”
Services accredited by the G-Cloud have been reviewed for high levels of reliability, security and compliance to meet public sector demands and provide complete transparency and a thorough analysis of all parts of the providers’ business and service delivery.
Outsourcery was recently formally accepted to offer it’s cloud-based IT and Unified Communications services via CloudStore as part of the Government’s G-Cloud 5 framework. The company also recently finalised the design for its secure O-Cloud Government platform, accredited to carry documentation classed as OFFICIAL and OFFICIAL with Information Assurance (IA) into the PSN – based on next generation architecture that will use Microsoft technologies and Dell hardware to provide a highly resilient, secure and scalable platform from which to help drive public sector and central government adoption of cloud services.
“In order to create services fit for local Government, issues like security and data sovereignty need to first be addressed and we have worked hard to ensure what we are developing does just this. Emphasis now needs to be placed on communicating the business benefits in order to increase confidence in cloud-services within local government authorities,” Linney concludes.