More suppliers available on G-Cloud 8 - Photo credit: Fotolia

The Government Digital Service released full details of G-Cloud 8 suppliers today, after the service went live on Monday.

In a statement, the Digital Marketplace team said that there were 757 new suppliers on the G-Cloud 8 framework, with 94% of these being small and medium-sized businesses. The previous iteration had 709 new suppliers, 95% of which were SMEs.

Related content

Delayed G-Cloud figures show sales topping £1.26bn
Government approves blockchain technology supplier on G-Cloud
Do councils have the IT it takes to make the most of devolution?

There are now 2,726 suppliers available on the marketplace – a central platform where all public sector bodies can procure digital services – and there are more than 26,000 services available from those suppliers.

It includes the first supplier of Blockchain technology, Credits, in a move that paves the way for more public services to make use of the distributed ledger technology that is best known for its use in the cryptocurrency Bitcoin.

Local government has recently been urged to increase its use of cloud services – an Eduserv survey published last month indicated that almost half of the top 100 biggest councils by revenue had no cloud strategy, and just 15% of those said they were considering one.

This is backed up by sales figures for G-Cloud services, with the latest figures showing that just 5% of the total £1.26bn sales came from local government. This is compared to 77% from central government.

Jos Creese, principal analyst on Eduserv’s Local Government Executive Briefing Programme, said: “Resistance to cloud adoption (and for that matter use of G-Cloud) is currently holding back councils from achieving optimum digital service performance.”

He added that if councils want to generate the service and financial benefits from digital transformation, they “must be prepared to use every technology tool in their armoury”.

Meanwhile work to update the G-Cloud framework is ongoing, with the ninth iteration expected to have more significant changes, as the GDS team plans to look at developing the end-to-end journey for users.

The work could see changes to the four G-Cloud categories – Infrastructure as a Service, Platforms as a Service, Software as a Service and Specialist Cloud Services – and offering more security information to suppliers and buyers.