Cloud Computing chairman’s weclome

As chair of the Global Access Partners taskforce on Cloud Computing Keith Besgrove delivered the following address at the GAP Workshop on Friday 24 June 2011 outlining the objectives of the event.

The reason we’re here today is to test the importance of some of the findings of the Cloud Computing task force and see if there is genuine interest in taking some of those issues further.

First of all, the task force, unsurprisingly, found that cloud was an important development. It clearly has the potential, at least, to achieve significant reductions in the cost and the speed of operation of a range of communications and computing systems. It also clearly has the potential to let people scale up and scale down applications quite quickly, which means that it offers all sorts of opportunities for flexibility and innovation.

A strong message that came from the task force is that the nexus of cloud computing and the National Broadband Network is quite an important development; important in ways that we can’t fully describe today. Nevertheless, the task force was pretty confident that it was a big deal.

It was important for the various levels of Government because it offers all sorts of opportunities for enhanced service delivery. I don’t need to tell people in this room just how important it’s likely to be in a whole range of business applications, particularly for large businesses, where we are seeing evidence of rapid uptake.

We also learnt that the research community is moving quickly to adopt cloud computing, particularly for forming small purpose built research teams which come together for short periods of time to knock over a particular research task and then move on.

Small business, we think, is likely to embrace cloud on a significant scale, but one of our concerns is whether they’ll do so on a well informed basis. We have similar concerns about the need to sustain consumer protection in a cloud environment.

Consumers are already moving to embrace a whole range of cloud solutions. We’re not sure they necessarily know they’re doing that. We’re also not sure that they’re fully aware of some of the pitfalls.

So we identified a series of areas of action. There was quite a lot of debate in the task force about just how suitable Australia might be as a hosting place. I have to say that the task force agreed to disagree on that. Some people thought that Australia was a terrible place. Other people thought it was a great place to be a future host for cloud.

We spent a lot of time talking about standards. It’s clear that that’s an area that requires further focus.

We also came back to the issue of privacy quite a lot; IT security and so on. That was really [overlain] with a concern about the extent to which consumer trust could actually be fulfilled within a cloud environment.

The task force has come up with a set of recommendations. I’m not going to go through them in detail, but suffice to say that there was a strong sense that Government was already playing something of a leading role but needed to continue to adopt a lead role with respect to cloud.

The vision, though, is focused predominantly on Government. The task force felt that there was a real challenge for a focus on trying to establish a clearer vision for what you can do with the combination of cloud computing and the national broadband network for the economy as a whole.

There was some discussion of establishing a longer term cloud task force or committee that might look at taking some of these issues forward. I think we might come back to that later in the day. It was also clear that there was a strong support for the idea that cloud computing, in its various forms, had the potential to transform lots of different components of the economy. I think that is something that we’ll come back to quite a lot.

My Minister Senator Stephen Conroy and his department have already picked up some of the learning from the task force. This is demonstrated in, for example, a program that my minister announced at the Australian Local Government Association’s conference in Canberra last week, where we’re particularly interested in taking cloud platforms and using those to transform local government services in Australia.

If you think about it, there’s over 500 local governments in Australia. They basically perform a similar range of functions.  Many of them don’t have much in the way of sophisticated online service delivery yet, apart from a few big, more sophisticated and more well resourced local governments. The potential is clearly there to actually use the combination of NBN connectivity and cloud platforms to transform what those governments can do and to enable ratepayers all across Australia to access local government services cheaper, better and faster online. So that’s just one example that we think we can pursue.

There will be many other examples in small and large business and the not-for-profit sector.

Clearly, there are some concerns about cloud computing and its relationship with the regulatory framework. Is there anything new or additional we need to do? There are questions about raising awareness, particularly for consumers and small business. The last area that the task force focused on was whether it made sense for industry to start looking at the idea of some sort of code of conduct for cloud computing service offerings. In Australia we rely quite strongly on self and co-regulation. So we leave that on the table, and you may wish to come back to it in the course of your discussions today.
 

Keith Besgrove is the First Assistant Secretary, Digital Economy Services Division in the Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy in Canberra. He provides advice to the Australian Government on strategic, legal and regulatory issues relating to communications and the digital economy. Other reponsibiles include the Australia Post, regional and indigenous communications, the Do Not Call Register, spam, consumer issues, domain names and numbers and international telecommunications.