HP is in talks with government to drive HP Hybrid Delivery Cloud Solutions within the public sector in order to reduce government costs and improve service delivery.
According to Manoj Bhoola - enterprise servers, storage and networking country manager, HP SA - the programme has the potential to beef up public sector services.
“Sita [the State IT Agency] can be the owner of the government's public cloud and start to provide a true service to the departments. Sita provides the network to the entire government, and likewise can begin self-providing infrastructure to government,” says Bhoola.
He adds: “A significant portion of a director general's budget is allocated to IT. If we can reduce that cost through a hybrid cloud system, a lot of that budget can go to where it's needed such as healthcare. It would also streamline many tendering processes.”
Bhoola predicts that HP is about a year away from seeing government implementing a full hybrid cloud-based service system. He adds that there have been some positive inroads made in the discussions. He says Sita is in a good position to take advantage of this technology and offer services online as a cloud offering.
Cost-cutting cloud
Bhoola explains that cloud computing can deliver financial benefits such as reduced costs by as much as 35%, fast deployment of new services, reduction in IT headcount and a pay-as-you-go operating cost model.
He notes that the concept of an instant-on enterprise means an IT environment is flexible, automated, and secure, and is able to adjust power and capacity in accordance to changing IT demand.
Bhoola explains that the cloud initiative started when HP acquired EDS in 2009, and part of the deal saw HP controlling data centres across the globe.
HP installed converged infrastructure and cloud service automation software into the data centres in the hopes of delivering unified security, governance and compliance, as well as physical and virtual infrastructure.
“Data centres must be flexible in order to offer a pay-as-you-grow licensing model. If a department needs more processing power, the system can be tweaked to give them more requirements, while meeting service level agreements,” says Bhoola.
Cloud training
Bhoola says HP has begun rolling out two-day HP Cloud Discovery workshops to help business and government develop strategies and design a blueprint for leveraging the cloud.
He indicates that businesses are turning to cloud suppliers that are not traditionally IT companies. For instance, he illustrates, traditional telcos and banks have started offering hosted cloud services.
According to research from HP, by 2015, senior business, government and technology executives believe that 18% of their IT delivery will be via the public cloud and 28% by private cloud. The remainder will be delivered in-house or outsourced.
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