Vodafone is due to be responsible for up to 20% of government data including huge amounts of information on UK citizens after it launches a public sector cloud service next month.
The telecoms giant’s Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud, Flexible Computing for Government, will go live in April, becoming a repository for masses of data on British citizens, potentially including tax and health records.
The service, the development cost of which remains undisclosed, can also be used by internal government departments and external contractors to build applications around the data, which can then be deployed within the cloud.
The news comes as the government looks to drive down costs and increase flexibility through its G-Cloud initiative to make use of more private sector cloud services.
Vodafone’s MD of cloud and hosting services, Michelle Senecal de Fonseca, told CBR that the company spent 18 months gaining security accreditation to hold the data.
"We don’t really know what the content is going to be," she claimed. "That’s up to them to decide, it’s up to us to be able to manage it. We don’t really see [the data]."
While she did not go into detail on security measures, they include analysing patterns of user behaviour, monitoring usage and preventing unauthorised access.
Tom Stockwell, head of hosting product management, added that the onerous process of gaining public sector accreditation is a reason Vodafone now becomes just the third shared IaaS provider (where it supports both private and public sector).
"It’s one of the reasons why what the government is trying to achieve with its cloud-first policy is so challenging for it and the rates of adoption are quite slow," he said.
"On the one hand they want to adopt the cloud, but the nature of what they’re doing is actually imposing a load of constraints to create services and therefore there aren’t a huge number of organisations that are willing to take the risk that their investment won’t get a return."
But Vodafone believes Flexible Computing for Government will both speed up services and provide increased private sector access to public sector contracts.
Stockwell said: "There’s potential to develop a real range of applications. Because the infrastructure is already accredited, that speeds up the time citizen services can be brought to market. It takes that headache away."
Vodafone will price usage on a pay as you go model based on use per virtual machine, per hour, while storage use is measured similarly, providing a flexible no-commitment contract.
