Government reveals latest G-Cloud figures - Photo credit: Flickr, Art Hitklif

Figures released this month show that sales on the government cloud procurement platform G-Cloud in July reached £62.2m.

This is a small drop from the £65.5m sales figures in June, although this was up on the previous month, when sales totalled £57.1m.

It takes the all-time sales through G-Cloud to £1.39bn, up from around £1.27bn in May, and £1.33bn in June.

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Central government make up the bulk of these sales – some £1.06bn, or 76% - while local government saw sales figures of £73m – or 5%.

This is the same proportion as the previous figures, and shows very little change when compared with July 2015, when cumulative sales reached £722m. At that time central government represented £522m of sales, or 72% of sales, while local government made up 5.9% of sales, or £43.1m.

This indicates the difficulties government has had in convincing local authorities to take up cloud services, which research company Eduserv has put down to a lack of knowledge or planning about the cloud - with almost half of top councils having no cloud strategy - and problems with policies that don’t encourage or even allow the procurement of services on G-Cloud.

Meanwhile, the most recent figures show that the wider public sector now has cumulative sales of £245m, which includes sales of £91m for the devolved administrations and £115m for health providers. There were sales of £11m to the not-for-profit sector.

Overall, the figures also show that small and medium size enterprises make up the bulk of sales in terms of number (64%) and in terms of value (54% or £753m). Large companies achieved sales of £640m.

When analysed by service provided, most are for specialist cloud services, with £47.8m of July’s total £62.2m sales going on these services. Cloud Software as a Service sales represented £6.83m, cloud Infrastructure as a Service, £5.55m and cloud Platform as a Service, £2.07m.

The government has also updated figures for the Digital Services framework – a site where small businesses can offer services to public bodies, which is being replaced by the Digital Outcomes and Services platform.

They show that sales had risen to £82m by August, up from £68m in June. Of these, 35% by value were to small and medium enterprises, at a cost of £28m - this is a slight decline for SMEs, who made up 40% of sales by volume in the June figures.

Meanwhile, the proportion of sales to central government through the digital services framework have increased, hitting 85% in the latest figures, up from 73% by value in the June accounts.