Kate's Comment

There has recently been a lot of news about cyber security, and it is a hot item in Whitehall, education and at the top levels in the IT industry. However, is this “new” cyber security concern warranted and do we need government and/or academia to get involved with a dedicated centre for tackling the issue? In short, I don’t think so, and this is why.

A couple of months ago HP started rumors that the G-Cloud had been canned, but that is most certainly not the case. I have spoken to a number of government officials and can confirm that it is going ahead. But what will it actually be, and is that what it should be? I was technical co-lead on phase two of…

I was recently asked to present at the OSCON conference in San Francisco in July 2010. I presented on the role of cloud computing in government IT and joined a panel to discuss the future of cloud computing.

One of the areas on which we reached clear agreement in the G-Cloud and App Store phase 2 was the definition the layers of the stack, infrastructure, platform and software, and their corresponding scalable, standardised counterparts: infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS) and software as a service (SaaS). Pleasingly, our delinations were very similar to prior work from two decades ago by IBM, except that ours incorporate virtualisation.

Following my involvement with the UK Cabinet Office’s G-Cloud and App Store programme I’m updating my definition of Cloud Computing, and also incorporating the NIST definition. My answer is “Cloud = Grid + (Utility * N)”, and here is how I arrived there…