Only marginal parts of governmental IT services can be moved to public cloud services, rather than the whole of government IT, warns Jaques Marzin, the French government Chief Information Officer. “Nobody wants us to put tax records or criminal records in the public cloud. But those are government operations that amount to terabytes of data”, he said.

The government also lacks the money to transfer operations to the cloud, Marzin told Le Magit, a French IT news publication, in August. The CIO, referring to his 2013 speech at a cloud conference, said that public services are useful for the development and testing of solutions, and for open data.

The French IT press in July reported that the Interdepartmental Directorate for ICT (DISIC), the IT department led by Marzin, had awarded a first contract for a EUR 1 million government cloud . The cloud is to cover the needs of nearly all ministries, including the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Defence, Education, Agriculture, Justice, Social Affairs and Health and Labour and Employment.

Cloud computing

Requirements include the use of the 64-bit x86 operating system, and interoperability with Open Stack, an open source cloud-computing platform.

Across the EU, governments are looking at the use of Cloud Computing.

In August, for example, the government of Portugal announced a policy on cloud computing, following a study by the country’s Agency for Administrative Modernisation (AMA). And on 10 and 11 September, Italy’s Agency for the Digitalization of the Public Sector (AGID) is hosting a conference on the topic.

More information:

Le Magit news item (in French)
Presentation at Eurocloud 2013 (video)
Silicon news item (in French)