Aussie govt aloof on cloud: CSC

The global head of CSC's cloud business has this week met with the representatives from the Federal Government to talk about cloud, but feels that the company's not getting the same reception that it would in the US.

Speaking at the Australian launch of the BizCloud product in Sydney today, Siki Giunta told journalists that while her conversations with the government had been productive, she sensed a wariness to deploying agency data into the cloud.

"AGIMO's position is that [cloud is] not safe, or ready for prime time, I agree. Not every workload is ready for cloud, but there is a lot of workloads already in the cloud," she said today.

AGIMO (the Australian Government Information Management Office) has come under fire from industry about its hesitance towards the stability and security of cloud computing, but said that recent service issues in the Amazon EC2 cloud had vindicated its cautious position.

Giunta said that she felt there is a lack of collaboration between the ICT industry and the government in Australia.

"Collaboration between industry and government on cloud in the US is very high," she said, with US government agencies working together with the industry on best practices. "I didn't see that in Canberra. I didn't feel that."

Giunta's comments came as the company announced the release of its BizCloud product in Australia.

BizCloud is a private cloud deployed on-premise by CSC and paid for by a rental model with three tiers of service: Standard, Enterprise and Enterprise Plus. The infrastructure as a service offering is already available in North America, the United Kingdom, France, Belgium, Luxembourg, Italy, Spain and Portugal.

"There is a model for every organisation — whether you want self-managed or a managed service option, or you want private, public or a hybrid cloud, CSC is following through on our promise of delivering the right cloud, the right way. With CSC, every organisation can easily make the initial move to "as a service" — infrastructure, platform and software on demand," Giunta said in a statement, adding that the service has an availability rating of 99.95 per cent.

CSC's management team said that the offering eliminates many of the barriers of entry into the cloud, including security and downtime concerns.

"Australian organisations have been uncertain about the move from traditional IT to the cloud. In an Australian first, customers can now take a safe first step to a pre-configured, integrated and tested private cloud on their own premises in just 10 weeks," CSC Australia's chief technology officer Bob Hayward said in a statement.

Giunta said today that CSC would work to integrate offerings of its other business units into the BizCloud offering to make it relevant to different markets, including the addition of iSoft healthcare software into the BizCloud suite for hospitals.

CSC recently closed the acquisition of Australian-based iSoft after much legal back and forth.

The BizCloud announcement also saw the appointment of Paul Gibbs to head up the Cloud Computing and Services business for CSC in Australia.

Gibbs told ZDNet Australia that while he has a big job ahead of him, he's confident that he can succeed in CSC's target markets, being the mining sectors of Queensland and Western Australia, where there is already a huge demand for data-intensive, 24/7 cloud computing services.

Recently, IBM Australia has also looked to muscle in on the Australian mining sector, after managing director Andrew Stevens told ZDNet Australia that the company would import the best talent into mining areas so that it could tap into the resources boom.

Gibbs said that while IBM Australia is a legitimate competitor to CSC's cloud business in resource-rich states, he feels that his company has a better cultural fit for miners to do business with.