Industry Cannot be Jockeys in the Grandstand in Government Race to Cloud
The Industry had to step up to help the government digital transformation, rather than complaining about agency conservatism, Macquarie Telecom managing director of government and hosting, Aidan Tudehope said today.
The Government had put in place the cloud first policy and developed important tools and guidance for agencies and departments, Mr. Tudehope, told the GovInnovate conference in Canberra.
Agencies were ready to respond, but private sector suppliers now needed to be flexible and supportive by both guiding them through the process and supplying fit for purpose services, he said.
Mr Tudehope warned against a repeat of the industry’s attempts to papering over legitimate concerns about data residency – concerns that have been borne out by subsequent advice from the Government’s cyber security experts and recent court cases from around the world.
“What the industry has not done is go the extra yard in listening and understanding, and working to give comfort about contentious issues from the supply side.”
“I am calling on the private sector to really make the effort to get inside the heads of public agencies if we want to contribute to making the government cloud transformation story really lift off,” he said.
Mr. Tudehope said the different “shelf life” of sensitive information in the Government and private sector illustrated their different needs.
The sensitivity of most commercial information could be measured in months, whereas much Government information had to be protected for years.
Mr. Tudehope also released the results of a survey commissioned by Macquarie that showed Government agencies were planning to move their ICT workloads to the cloud in the coming year, but did not have a clear understanding of how or why.
“These data show the cloud first policy message is getting through, but it is now putting up hard against the lack of experience inside the bureaucracy.”
Questioned on plans to increase their expenditure on cloud, 60 percent of agencies said they planned to lift their spending on cloud infrastructure in the next year.
But a large proportion said the biggest barriers to doing this lack of a strategy, skills, and/or understanding how to manage cloud contracts.
“All the goodwill in the world will not magically fill that experience gap, and this is where the industry has to help,” Mr Tudehope said.
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About Macquarie Telecom
Macquarie Telecom has a long history of servicing Government agencies, with 42 percent of agencies trusting Macquarie to deliver clean Internet and email behind its secure Internet gateway. Macquarie Telecom provides government agencies with Information Security Registered Assessors Program (IRAP) assessed, ICON Connected and Unclass (DLM) secure cloud solutions, which deliver enterprise-grade performance, helping government agencies got to the cloud securely, quickly and reliably. All data remains in Australian, under Australian jurisdiction, and not subject to foreign law.d.