Recommendation 33

Government has made attempts to co–ordinate in order to gain benefits from its scale. GCF has signed agreements with the major cloud providers which allow them to treat the public sector as a single customer for the purposes of determining volume discounts.56 However, DSIT recognised that government’s current approach to buying cloud was fragmented and “is not right”. It told us that “there is real work to do on that specific point.” We therefore asked how government could become a modern and sophisticated buyer of cloud. DSIT told us that “the way cloud economics works is that being able to write a commitment to a cloud provider matters 54 Qq 2, 23, 29; C&AG’s Report, para 12 55 Qq 27–29 56 C&AG’s Report, para 12 20 an awful lot to them, and it gives us maximum commercial leverage.” 57 GCF said that “ultimately, to get the best leverage, you would do a single deal” but that “in practice, it is very difficult to line up multiple customers with differing requirements”. It explained that improving its approach will entail moving beyond memoranda and frameworks to a position where commercial arrangements support government being able to commit the money and contract singly with the same supplier.58