By Paul Hemsley

The Department of Environment and Climate Change discussed its work with vendor ASG in a panel at the Cloud 2.0 conference.

ASG national solutions manager, Brett Tyson and Department of Environment and Climate Change, director of service delivery Kal Thompson gave a talk on the panel, covering the multi-vendor reality of hybrid cloud environments.

ASG is the provider for the department’s cloud services.

Mr Tyson said the biggest challenge with cloud is that it is really about outsourcing in a different way.

“The ability to use cloud, with the internal clouds which you can use is basically a new way in which you can deliver services to the business, but the public and the hybrid cloud model really means that you have to focus on the governance,” Mr Tyson said.

Mr Thompson said the IT department virtualised and outsourced everything, then “lo and behold, we were infrastructure-as-a-service, platform-as-a-service and in one or two instances, we were software-as-a-service”.

“We had essentially understood how to outsource our IT business, we were starting to work on things like how we could contract, what terms and conditions we put in there, and then where we would get value for money for taking that level of risk,” Mr Thompson said.

He said outsourcing is “just a form of risk transference”.

“You decide whether the offers you’re getting are worth the money you’re paying for or the risk you’re transferring,” he said.

According to Mr Thompson, providers are found in all the service tiers, but what could not be found was a provider with all.

“There were either experts on software-as-a-service, which for us is a fully configured and managed application, we don’t care about what service it’s running on; or infrastructure-as-a-service and then we do care very much about putting an operating system in the application,” Mr Thompson said.

He said the risk lies in transferring applications between vendors and where they are located and “what do they do; how much can they see; what risks are there?”

“We also had a case where we might have a contract for support of our environment with one vendor but the services themselves were being provided and managed by another vendor, so the whole one-neck-to-choke thing disappeared quite quickly,” Mr Thompson said.