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

By Ron Stuart, Manager, Department of Internal Affairs, New Zealand

Ron Stuart, Manager, Department of Internal Affairs, New Zealand

Right Time, Right Place, Right Price

It’s hardly surprising that the market is one of our world’s oldest and cleverest inventions. Marketplaces, whether a farmers’ market, a stock exchange, or a digital trading platform, address an age-old problem: how to connect many buyerswith many sellers, in real time, while giving them enough information to make trusted, secure and profitable transactions.

Right time, right place, right price – these are the conundrums that marketplaces help resolve. But what are the conundrums that we in the world of Information Communications and Technology face today?

• The pace of change continues to accelerate.

• Innovation is boundless but is not always visible because of the increasing pace of change.

• The accelerated pace of disruptive change generated by cloud services presents opportunities to change the way the public and private sectors operate, exit cost, and deliver services.

• Increased availability of information and data analytics and predictive modelling have the potential to unlock the value of information to help solve complex problems and generate innovative ideas.

How does This Apply to Government?

How then do we apply the response to these conundrums to the supply of cloud services, in particular to government agencies?

• How do we connect demand from these agencies with the increasingly large number of local and global suppliers of cloud services quickly, securely, and at the best price?

• How do we keep up with, and get ahead of, accelerating change in technology and the global ICT industry?

• How do we address our elected official’s expectations of the public sector to transform the way it serves citizens?

We can’t do this with obsolete technology and outdated mind-sets.

Agencies need to have access to a far wider range of innovative cloud services from a mix of local and global suppliers

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.

Founded in 1840 as a government agency, the Department of Internal Affairs of New Zealand serve and connect people, communities and government to build a safe, prosperous and respected nation. DIA is New Zealand Government Functional Lead for ICT.