Ark of the Government deal confirmed, joint venture established

Good thinking by Tory Central Office

If there is a change of Govt after the election, it will blow up on someone else's watch and they can get the blame.

If the conservatives get back in they can then simply take over the other 75% then flog it off to whichever company has apponted the most defeated Tory MPs on their boards.

Trebles all round.

And for anyone asking about treasonous things like being good for (small g) government or taxpayers, the Tower is still standing.

"It's being taken care of by top men," says the consultant. And then we see a "crown hosting"-labelled server being wheeled into a massive, smoke-filled data centre with an capita logo on the door.

"Ark of the Government"

Love it!

Lets be positive

I think this is a great step forward for government in breaking the monopoly of the existing Usual Suspects supplier base. The Government Digital Agenda has a strong focus on "fail fast", and by pushing on commodity compute the likelihood of flawed projects gestating into huge money-pits is reduced.

There are already some players in the government accredited multi-tenanted cloud space, so it is clear that diversity is key to minimizing commercial risk.

There are a number of ways that commercial risk and concentration risk can be mitigated. Firstly by ensuring that future virtual environments are easily portable not just across physical hosts, not just across data-centres, but across suppliers and different cloud platforms. In my view the work of the Home Office Technology and GDS teams are well-advanced in their thinking here.

A second and not mutually exclusive approach is for the government to continue to inform the market (as they have been doing for a few years now) and have some skin in the game through investment vehicles like these.

My only concern is what will happen after the change of leadership at Cabinet Office - Francis Maude and his technology and procurement senior team have really changed the game so far, and this impetus must me maintained.

Oh dear oh dear

I've actually been to a datacenter at Corsham, which seems to be one actually leased from Ark. About 8 years ago though

Oh dear. Their "high security" was a joke. The "secure MOD facility" was secured by some old buffer in a kiosk, who waved us through. We spent the meeting in a room with a door marked "must be kept closed at all time" wedged open. And you could feel the heat vary (to rather high levels) as you walked through the racks of the datacentre, showing their cooling plan wasn't up to much.

I hope they've improved.