Interest in cloud computing remains high in private and public sectors. Despite recent reports suggesting the government might be moving away from the idea of a comprehensive G Cloud system, there is still an appetite for shared IT and a more flexible and economical way of supporting public services.
Participants in a debate sponsored by Citrix as part of the recent Public Sector IT Leadership Forum made clear that real barriers remain to the adoption of cloud computing. Among these, security and privacy issues appear the most difficult to resolve, especially as not all cloud providers have UK, or even EU, data centres. This creates a significant problem for IT and data centre managers in central and local government, who are worried about staying within data protection laws – especially if there is a possibility of citizens’ personal data being stored on servers in the US, which are covered by the Homeland Security Act and could be open to inspection.
