Government celebrates G-Cloud one year anniversary

The government is celebrating the one year anniversary of its G-Cloud programme, as public sector purchases of such services have shot up by £2m in the past month.

The G-Cloud programme is aimed at driving the uptake of cloud computing in the public sector.

The online system allows the public sector to rent the use of services as needed and do away with lengthy contracts. The system also allows SMBs to sell to government departments in equal capacity to larger enterprises.

According to the government, G-Cloud suppliers have now made £6m from the programme since its launch, with over 70 percent of this going to SMBs.

At the time the third G-Cloud framework was launched just a month ago, purchases of G-Cloud services stood at £4m, with 61 percent of this spend going to SMBs.

The G-Cloud framework is the backbone to the CloudStore, and is the marketplace where suppliers compete for specific contracts with the Government Procurement Services to offer their services to the public sector. The CloudStore is where suppliers list their services.

The government said today it is about to begin the construction of its third iteration of CloudStore, which will go live in the spring with improved guidance, support and resources for both suppliers and buyers to make use of the framework and the cloud.

Plans are also afoot to allow staff to rate the cloud computing services they buy from the CloudStore.

G-Cloud programme director Denise McDonagh said she remains convinced the G-Cloud is a game changer for the way government buys, manages, delivers and operates IT.

"The move to purchasing IT services as a commodity requires a culture shift for the public sector that won't happen overnight," said McDonagh.

"After only a year, though, most big government departments have bought services from the cloud, and there is significant buy-in from local government. Evidence of the benefits of cloud is growing all the time, and we are working with buyers to help them adapt to commodity-based IT purchasing."

The latest iteration of the framework, launched a month ago in January, offers the public sector a choice of 3,200 services from 459 suppliers, three-quarters of which are small and mid-size businesses.