Is the public sector embracing the cloud?

The opportunities from the government’s CloudStore, announced in March 2011, are not being taken up by public sector staff, as discussed in a recent report from VMWare. The BBC Technology website reports that due to a ‘lack of enthusiasm’, the targets of ‘50% of new government IT spending to move to cloud computing services by 2015’ may not be met. The aim of CloudStore is to ‘make it cheaper and easier for public sector organisations to choose and buy "off the shelf" IT services”. Some departments are already locked into long contracts; others involved in the survey were concerned about security. The article does show a positive user of CloudStore. Liverpool Womens’ and Alder Hey Children’s NHS Foundation Trusts have saved costs of 10% by replacing four data centres with cloud services. For more on the public sector and the cloud read the article at http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-18103750