Cloud Marketplaces will enable Governments to Adopt and Transition to Public Cloud Services in a Trusted, Easy and Secure Way

How do We Tackle This?

Answer - Develop a Government ICT Marketplace

The Idea Goes Like This: Agencies provide public services to a large, diverse and discerning populace. To deliver these services quickly and effectively - and provide great service and value for money - agencies must acquire innovative technologies at affordable prices as they get to market, not several years (or decades) later.

At present, agencies struggle to adopt cloud services using traditional procurement and security and risk assess¬ments. This limits the range of cloud services that are considered, increases time¬frames, duplicates effort, imposes additional costs, and bypasses corporate controls to create “shad¬ow IT”.

Establishing an ‘ICT marketplace’ will enable agencies to access a wider range of public cloud services without the complexity and cost of typical procurement practices. To tackle this, we’re proposing to create a ‘cloud services ecosystem’ with a marketplace at its centre.

The Government Public Cloud Marketplace: In a marketplace buyers can focus on what’s most important, getting the right outcome at the right price, test and try new products, turn on and turn off products that have been procured on a subscription basis. Agencies need to have access to a far wider range of innovative cloud services from a mix of local and global suppliers. To do this we need to firstly establish a set of principles:

•Be user experience centric (not technology centric) and enable Government Agencies to consume cloud services in an effortless, secure and efficient way.

• Establish Marketplace entry criteria and on boarding that will reflect commercial terms whereby the Government is considered as a single consumer.

• Have low supply barriers to entry to encourage innovation.

• Encourage price transparency and highly competitive categories.

• Make it much easier for agencies to realise benefits from ICT digital services, with a focus on cloud.

• Be scalable in terms of supporting a large number of eligible agencies and vendors.

What are the Benefits?

• Encourages greater competition and innovation by opening up the market to, and exposing capability from significantly more suppliers.

• Reduces the time and cost of the procurement process.

• Improves security by certifying public cloud services.

• Provides analytics around All of Government pub¬lic cloud service consumption and enables end-to-end management.