Industry consultation: Data Centre as a Service (DCaaS)
Hi everyone,
The purpose of this post is to alert you to our upcoming industry consultation on Data Centre as a Service (DCaaS). This is one of the projects under the Australian Government Data Centre Strategy 2010-25 (Strategy). Earlier this year, in an update on the Data Centre Program, I noted that we would engage industry this calendar year regarding DCaaS.
The aim of the DCaaS approach to market is to provide an industry capability to consolidate agency requirements into common ICT solutions and to assist agencies to move to shared resource solutions. While DCaaS is targeted at the smaller agencies, solutions may also be suitable for larger agencies.
There are three specific areas of interest:
- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), for services such as storage and disaster recovery;
- Software as a Service (SaaS), for services such as email and website hosting services; and
- Platform as a Service (PaaS), for data centre operations where an agency requires assistance to manage the agency IT equipment located in a data centre.
Services may or may not be cloud based, as defined in the Australian Government Cloud Computing Strategic Direction paper.
I plan to use a similar approach to engage industry to that which we used in 2009 to inform the development of the Data Centre Strategy. AGIMO will host an information session before the end of November. The session will be announced on this blog and on AusTender, which will also be used for registrations. In this session, AGIMO will provide details of the information being sought and on agencies’ requirements.
Next, we will ask for semi-formal presentations from interested industry representatives to senior agency IT representatives from a mixture of small, medium and large agencies. Each presentation will have a similar agenda and a fixed time. Presenters will be required to cover a standard set of issues but there will also be time set aside for related topics of the presenter’s choice. Registration will be via AusTender. I expect to conclude the industry presentations in December 2011.
In early 2012, AGIMO will release a draft scope of works on this blog and ask for feedback. This helped us a lot last time to shape the requirements for the Data Centre Facilities Panel. Later, there will be an open tender and the establishment of a panel or panels.
Cheers
Kayelle
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Frontline are an Australian organisation that already have a Hosted Private Cloud and Platform as a service offering.
I would be very interested to be involved in this consultative process.
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Hi Greg,
Thank you for your response, an industry briefing will be announced soon on AusTender and we’ll make note of the briefing on this blog.
Regards
The Data Centre Team
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Kayelle
Macquarie Telecom welcomes your announcement and the update on the proposed timing for the DCaaS RFT.
We are firm believers in the benefits of a two-way dialogue between government and industry to getting the right outcome and appreciate AGIMO’s continued leadership in this regard. We look forward to the opportunity for industry to make presentations to government agencies and also contribute to the draft SOW.
I note that you mention the presentations would be to a mixture of small, medium and large agencies. Has the scope of the DCaaS changed? It was my understanding from previous statements that the primary focus of this panel is the 50 Agencies with ICT expenditure of less than $2Million?
Regards
Derek
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Hi Derek,
Thanks for your query. The DCaaS concept was originally focussed on smaller agencies. During our consultations, we discovered interest from larger agencies, some of which have indicated that the solutions and capabilities may be suitable for them too.
We will expand on the project scope during the industry briefing.
Regards
The Data Centre Team
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Hi Kayelle,
I’ve been working my way through a number of the AGIMO policy documents recently and it’s good to see the Government backend ICT asset consolidation. Given the current fiscal environment the APS cost control arising from improved economies of scale should make this an attractive proposition to decision makers.
I have a feeling though that, given the conservative stance of the APS on all things ICT, we’ll end up somewhere between IaaS and SaaS for quite some time (probably more weighted to IaaS, maybe some SaaS for department corporate functions). There are some things that I’m curious about though.
A lot of the AGIMO policy documents discuss standardisation in the context of the Data Reference Model, with the goal of ensuring better agency/department interoperability in the future. What I was wondering is, has there been much discussion of the Government’s policy approach to technical standards (e.g. open/proprietary data ...
... formats, vendor specific hardware etc.)?
While it’s a difficult issue that requires a degree in crystal ball gazing to navigate, picking the wrong ‘winner’ could lead to vendor lock-in or limit future system extensibility. Both would lead to higher future ICT spending, due to lack of tender competition and the need for higher future ICT capital expenditure respectively.
Also, it will be interesting to see if some of the larger agencies like the ATO and Defence choose to opt-out of consolidated ICT. I think the amount of resistance you’ll encounter will stem from two things: when do diminishing returns to centralisation start to kick in (something worth finding a credible answer to), and how much and how fast the end user’s experience is be affected (which will determine the level of organisational resistance to change).
Anyhow, if you’ve managed to make it to the end of this post without falling asleep I would love to hear your thoughts on these issues.
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Hi interested Public Servant, you must be very keen to be awake blogging at 3AM
Thank you for your comments and questions. You may not be aware that John Sheridan is leading the Australian Delegation as chair of the Strategic Advisory Committee (SAC) for Joint Technical Committee 1 (JTC1) on ICT and Digital Economy standards matters. This was announced yesterday by a blog post by AGIMO and a media release by the Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy. I was waiting to respond to your comment until this was public knowledge.
The Committee reports to the International Organisation for Standards (ISO)/International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) Joint Technical Committee 1 (JTC1). You can follow the JTC1 website and on Twitter on the #JTC1 hashtag. John Sheridan is also on Twitter as @sherro58.
You might also find ...
... the Common Operating Environment and Open Source Software blog posts interesting too
You comment on opt-out arrangements. The formal requirements (PDF, 46KB) are on the Department of Finance and Deregulation website. So far, no one has been granted an opt-out. The reason is fairly simple. The whole of government procurement arrangements provide far better prices than any agency can achieve on their own. Our arrangement also cover a range of services rather than being locked into types of technology.
Tx again Kayelle
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