Spouting Shite

The public secotor can use Cloud Computing too!

I just gave a presentation to the North East Chapter of SOCITM (Society of Information Technology Management) in St James’s Park, Newcastle-upon-Tyne. SOCITM is the professional association for public sector ICT managers.

In the presentation I gave an introduction the Cloud Computing (SaaS, PaaS & IaaS) and how the technology is different to the doomed ASP model of the Dot Bomb days.

The main point of my talk was that while Cloud Computing opens up several security and compliance problems (if you use sensitive data in a shared environment) it is perfectly safe to use for rather inoculous data that is not ‘sensitive’. While you would be silly to use a SaaS provider to host your Child Protection Register, it would be perfectly fine to host your Christmas website or to host a large file that you want to make available to many users.

We also touched upon the advantages of using IaaS providers to rent hardware on short term projects or for development. The main goal is to lower investment costs, increase speed to market and provide a better service to your userbase. In my view, the main advantages of the technology are:

• Pay per use
• Instant Scalability
• Reliability
• APIs

You can download my presentation here:

• Cloud Computing introduction (Powerpoint 2007)
• Cloud Computing introduction (Powerpoint 2003)