The key IT principles for Sweden’s government cloud services should be vendor-independence, open standards and open source, experts recommend. On Tuesday, the government shared service centre (Statens servicecenter, SSC) published an advisory report, containing the opinions of management at government data centres. Sweden’s public administrations would profit immensely from national, reliable and secure cloud services, these experts agree.
Sweden today has more than 200 governmental data centres, SSC writes in an opinion piece published in Svenska Dagbladet on Tuesday. The cost of running these data centres is unnecessarily high, the SSC director general and the project manager say. In addition, the data centres have high IT costs, poor coordination, low client skills and struggle with procurement.
The majority of the services currently run in these data centres could be replaced by a government cloud, SSC says. This would reduce the number of data centres from 200 to no more than 10. The benefits include increased energy efficiency, lower staff costs, smaller buildings, and doing away with the need for procurement. SSC believes that the government cloud can cut IT operation costs by 30 % in just a few years. “That amounts to billions.”
The government cloud vision aggregates the views of 15 IT departments at the country’s largest public authorities, including the state pension agency, social insurance agency, national land survey, police, and tax authority. The report also summarises cloud services experiences in Denmark, Finland, France, Canada, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom.
More information:
Government cloud vision document (in Swedish)
Open letter by the Statens servicecenter (in Swedish)
National Government Service Centre (Statens servicecenter)