The single largest improvement to G-Cloud is on its way, says Databarracks
The Cabinet Office's decision to revamp the search functionality of the CloudStore is a positive step in addressing concerns surrounding the G-Cloud framework, says Peter Groucutt, managing director of cloud service provider Databarracks.
Recently, Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude announced that public sector organisations have now spent £175m procuring IT services through the framework, almost doubling the spend since January this year.
Central to this growth has been G-Cloud's ability to listen to feedback from suppliers and public sector departments, and make improvements where necessary. There are lots of changes coming in the new Digital Marketplace, but the single most important is the planned improvement in search.
Groucutt explains:
"From the buyer side, what you really want from the CloudStore or the Digital Marketplace is to go to one procurement tool and use it to find the services you need, create your long-lists and short-lists and then buy the service from the supplier.
"Our expectation of how accurate and simple a search process should be come from our use of search engines like Google. In fact, we have heard a lot of feedback from G-Cloud buyers that in order to find services, they have to go outside the CloudStore to search for services in a search engine, then go back into the CloudStore and find the suppliers by name.
"We have tested the CloudStore to see if customers will be able to find our services. If you search for "Backup" for instance, you would expect the first results you are presented with to be backup services. Until now, that hasn't been the case. The results you actually receive might be an infrastructure or platform service, but one that includes "backup" in the description."
But, Groucutt continues, the improvements to functionality will be significant:
"The new Digital Marketplace, which will replace the current CloudStore for G-Cloud 6, will actually prioritise titles and descriptions so users will start to get the right results. In addition, the Digital Marketplace promises a better, more user-centric approach to search altogether.
"The new search technology will make the whole process much more user-friendly, allowing users to search more quickly and easily, and most importantly provide them with the most relevant results."
Groucutt concludes: "It's great to see these changes happening; now the key is to ensure a continued level of improvement across all areas of the framework. The latest figures reported by Francis Maude are promising, but for the public sector to continue to make the best use of services available to them through G-Cloud, other concerns need to be addressed too.
"Education is still seen as the biggest barrier to cloud adoption by the public sector. More needs to be done by central government to educate local authorities and councils on the benefits of buying services through the framework.
"Making G-Cloud really work is a big task, but it's encouraging to see that steps are being taken to address the quick-wins like "search" that will deliver big impact quickly. The framework is maturing and both customers and suppliers are beginning to see the benefits. It's still very much a learning process and further investment is needed to break down the last remaining barriers."
Databarracks has confirmed it has been selected onto the G-Cloud 5 framework with services available in Lots 1, 3 and 4 or Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Software as a Service (SaaS) and Specialist Cloud Services.
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About Databarracks:
Databarracks provides secure, Infrastructure as a Service, Backup as a Service and Disaster Recovery as a Service from UK-based, ex-military data centres.
Databarracks is certified by the Cloud Industry Forum, ISO 27001 certified for Information Security and has been selected as a provider to the G-Cloud framework. For more information, please see:www.databarracks.com
Contact:
Nick Bird or Andrew Chatterton
Spreckley Partners Ltd
Tel: +44 (0) 207 388 9988
Email: databarrackspr@spreckley.co.uk