AGIMO outs datacentre discussion paper

The Australian Government Information Management Office (AGIMO) has called for industry comment on a discussion paper regarding the government's strategy to offer datacentre-as-a-service to 50 per cent of government agencies that spend less than $2 million per annum on ICT.

In December last year, AGIMO flagged its intentions to look into datacentre ownership as a method of reducing costs for agencies. Following a feasibility study, AGIMO has decided to move ahead with the plan and its datacentre-as-a-service (DCaaS) procurement is expected to take place in the second half of 2011.

On Friday, AGIMO called for industry to comment on the government's goals and proposed solutions for offering DCaaS to agencies.

The goal of the service isn't to make money from agencies, AGIMO said, instead it is designed to take on the burden of ICT for agencies who don't have the resources to provide their own ICT services.

The paper seeks to understand what the current DCaaS marketplace looks like, the technology used, the cost of infrastructure, which security measures protect data, how available resources are and the issues likely to affect the success of the project, including data ownership issues.

The intention is to house all ICT infrastructure in a multi-tenant government datacentre, but AGIMO has called for comment on whether the datacentre should host only agency-owned infrastructure, vendor-owned or a mixture of both .

Comments on the discussion paper are open until 18 March 2011.

Last month the Department of Finance and Deregulation released a draft consultation paper looking into adopting cloud services for public-facing government agency data.