The specialist digital unit has put in a place two deals this year to support the creation of a platform to provide a single source of info on Whitehall consumption
The Government Digital Service is progressing its work to track departments’ use of cloud computing and related spending.
The organisation, which is based in the Department of Science, Innovation and Technology, last month entered into an initial six-month agreement with specialist software firm Appvia. The deal follows on from an engagement signed earlier this year by the digital unit’s predecessor, the Central Digital and Data Office.
Over the course of that contract, the supplier supported work to design and develop a platform that could, ultimately, provide government digital experts with a “centralised view of near real-time information about cloud utilisation in the public sector, across cloud vendors”. The text of the latest contract states that “this information is not currently accessible in a consolidated form”.
The document adds that GDS wishes to implement a system that “can rapidly… onboard multiple public sector organisations”.
“We anticipate this requirement to focus on a subset of cloud suppliers and organisational cost data initially, with a view to expanding the scope of both cloud suppliers and volume of organisations in future,” the contract says.
With the underlying platform having been developed earlier in the year, the latest engagement is expected to see at least 12 departments added to the system, with data collected on government use of Microsoft Azure cloud services.
Over the course of the contract, which can be extended for a further six months, Appvia will also be asked to “work with GDS to further develop the cloud cost dashboard in line with user needs” and, eventually, provide a “thorough handover of the tools and processes developed”, to ensure that the digital unit can continue to support the platform into the future.
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The initial aim of the project is to provide a single, unified “view of resilience risk in the cloud”, as well as to “baseline and improve general FinOps practices across public sector organisations”.
Sometimes referred to as ‘cloud optimisation’ or ‘cloud financial management’, FinOps “maximises the business value of cloud, enables timely data-driven decision making, and creates financial accountability through collaboration between engineering, finance, and business teams”, according to the website of the FinOps Foundation – a specialised subsidiary of not-for-profit open source industry body the Linux Foundation.
In a recently published blog, GDS outlined that creating the cloud cost dashboard is ultimately intended to deliver the objective of “reducing costs without reducing function”. The public sector collectively spends more than £1bn a year on cloud, according to the post.
“The eventual aim of the cloud cost data solution is to get a central picture of the total usage and a breakdown of spend on cloud services across the public sector,” the blog said. “This is so that future cloud services will be able to be procured and provisioned in the most cost efficient manner. This can only be achieved by creating a baseline against which these services are measured. With a consolidated data set on cloud spend, we will be able to enter into future negotiations with cloud service providers from a position of greater knowledge. Most importantly, this will help ensure that taxpayer money is spent wisely on our most critical technology services.”
Between them, the two contracts with Appvia could be worth almost £300,000, inclusive of VAT.
