French public sector’s never-ending struggle with the cloud

External cloud

Under the strategy, government agencies may outsource non-critical data to an external cloud provided by Orange Business Services. But the only cloud services they can use in this context are infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) or a development environment in which government agencies can develop applications.

The second part of the strategy is a plan to develop a private cloud because all critical data must stay within the government. 

Pierre-José Billotte, president of EuroCloud France, said the government’s strategy is a very slow start. “For one thing, the outsourcing contract with Orange Business Services is only worth around €2m,” he said. “This is small change for Orange Business Services, so the company is not likely to make this project a priority.

“In addition, the private cloud has yet to be built – and that is not an easy thing to do. Building the private cloud will cost money and time.”

And there is another problem, said Billotte: “Different government agencies have their own independent IT departments that don’t take orders from the central government IT department, which can only co-ordinate and influence.

“So even once the private cloud is in place, if it doesn’t appear attractive to the different agencies, it will remain unused.”

What is more, although rationalisation of IT resources could save costs in the long term, in the short term, using cloud will actually cost more. There will be a transition cost – the cost of moving data – and on top of that, there will be a period when government agencies continue to operate datacentres as they slowly transition to cloud computing. During this period, the government will be paying about twice as much.

Cyber security expert Gerome Billois from Wavestone said security is another expensive aspect of moving public sector data and applications to the cloud. “Where is the data stored? How can they protect themselves from having other governments spy on them?” he said.

“Is some government data being stored outside France? Of course. After all, the government has Twitter accounts and other social network accounts. It is no secret that much of that information winds up in the US.

“But the government classifies data based on the levels of trust needed to store it. None of the data on government social media accounts is in the critical category.”

Billois said government data has to be separated into different categories depending on security requirements – and the process of identifying and separating data costs money.

EuroCloud’s Billotte added: “The problem is that the government has no money to invest in the transition.”

Past problems

To put the government’s recent strategy into perspective, Billotte recalled how France has dabbled in cloud computing in the past. “The government made two attempts at providing cloud services guaranteeing 100% data storage in France,” he said.

“These two attempts took the form of two separate companies, Cloudwatt and Numergy, in which the public bank invested as a shareholder. The French government was not a direct shareholder; it was the public bank that had about a one-third stake – about €75m – in each company. Private companies put in the rest.

“Both projects failed. Why? The first reason is that neither company had the right mindset – a startup mindset. In both cases, the chairman was from a large company, so they didn’t have an innovation culture or vision.

“The second reason is that these companies provided something like a theoretical framework, not something market-driven.”

In trying to build a private cloud, France is likely to run into the same problems it encountered in the two sovereign cloud initiatives. Unless the government builds a private cloud that responds to the needs of the various government agencies – which constitute the market for the private cloud – France will end up with yet another unused government-sponsored cloud.