

UK Government G-Cloud project - Sales Information - EwanToo
http://gcloud.civilservice.gov.uk/about/sales-information/

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tommorris
G-Cloud is interesting. What G-Cloud is doing as far as I'm aware is making a
lot of government IT stuff into a commodity. So, for instance, something like
making a Wordpress theme or providing a hosting service, that becomes a
commodity service. There are then pre-approved suppliers. This is kind of
sensible: in the private sector, I don't have to go through a complicated
process to decide whether to use Rackspace or Linode or EC2 or whatever for a
small project.

(Incidentally, just because it's called G-Cloud doesn't mean that all or even
most of the things they are spending money on are "cloud computing" services,
but then that's a big fuzzy bullshit word anyway. Pretty much everything these
days involves putting things on the Internet, so I guess it could be claimed
to be cloud computing since there are computers hooked up to The Cloud,
formerly known as the Internet).

The problem is that quite a lot of technological spending by the government
isn't on commodity stuff but on custom development work. And because of the
procurement process, that often doesn't get done in a lean manner. (But I
don't know, I'm just a developer. I only play a bureaucrat on TV.)

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Zenst
Security wise it is a not great. You can see Symantec Ltd is paid a fair bit
so can make some fair assumptions upon AV software used by certain
departments. MOD suppliers listed, thats a social engineering opertunity for
some right there.

Interesting some of the companies are very dependant upon there goverment
contracts and looking at some It looks like they were born out of them. I'm
sure somebody more versed in company background checks could provide more
insight into the onteresting choices and somebody who currently active in pen
testing could provide a better insight into how this data can be leveraged.

Still at least its out there to be discussed, kudos to the goverment for that.

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donall
Security by obscurity is NOT security. If this kind of transparency results in
an increased number of successful attacks, then they will be forced to
implement more adequate security. This is a Good Thing.

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casca
This is a good step forward for the UK government. It would be even more
useful if it was also available as CSV for easier analysis when the data gets
larger.

Interesting that Huddle was paid GBP 442,429 (around USD 700k) in the 5
months. Their annual turnover at April 2011 was GBP 1,568k so that's a sizable
amount (although they've grown since then). It seems that the government might
consider a better negotiation strategy given how much their spending with
Huddle.

(Sad to see that Huddle requires the calling of a premium rate number in the
UK. It's like expecting US customers to call a 1-900 number to speak to sales)

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EwanToo
I believe the full data set is available here:

<http://data.gov.uk/dataset/cloudstore_catalogue_version>

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pbhjpbhj
CSV, ODS and JSON formats available on that link.

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s_henry_paulson
Interesting, and a step in the right direction, but one has to wonder, if they
were to make more detailed information available, how much money could they
save by armchair analysts offering pricing and purchasing suggestions.

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eckyptang
Unsurprisingly this is entirely missing operating costs...

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jdevonport
Surprising not to see Rackspace or Amazon on the list!

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5h
If the suppliers suppliers were detailed however....

