With the CloudStore newly launched and its first user secured, interest around cloud is ramping up among public sector's IT buyers.
The NHS will be no exception, according to Kevin Holland, service management consultant for Connecting for Health (CfH). Within 18 months, every NHS organisation will be using some sort of cloud service, he predicts.
Although CfH is not "naive enough" to believe that NHS organisations will drop current technologies favour of CloudStore services, Holland maintains that a spike in cloud adoption will come when existing contracts are due for renewal. At that point, he says, health bodies should examine their actual needs, and see if there are any cloud services – either singly or in combination – that can be used to meet them.
"The principle being you shouldn't be specifying something, you should be seeing what is available," he says. "It's a different challenge and mindset."
Rather than stipulating what sort of services should be included in the CloudStore, the Government Procurement Service left it to suppliers to offer what cloud services they had. Those services that are featured as part of the catalogue are therefore those that vendors believe would appeal to the largest cross section of public sector buyers.
Do the CloudStore's services need to be specially designed for the NHS? Yes, says Holland. "The services up there now are very much the sort every organisation would want to take. But as the CloudStore becomes the way of offering services to the public sector, organisations that have vertical market solutions for the NHS should be looking to the CloudStore as a way of providing those services."
The highly scalable nature of cloud services mean they are perfect for clinical trials that need computing power and storage for a short period, according to Holland.
The NHS has been using cloud services for some time - he cites NHSmail as one example, and the electronic staff record has been hosted remotely by McKesson for over five years, as another.
Holland also highlights the increasing take up of collaboration tools, which is set to accelerate after the health and social care bill is passed. "There are already collaboration tools which are provided through cloud services, so that instead of having to set up your own Sharepoint site, people are getting access to collaboration tools. Huddle is one we are using within the Cabinet Office," he says.
If there is one issue seeming to hold back the adoption of cloud services it is that of data sovereignty, and the question of whether sensitive public data should be allowed to be kept offshore.
"The challenges for security are no different [than for on-premise technology], the solutions are no different. It is about looking at your threats, your vulnerabilities and whether the person housing the data can mitigate against those," Holland says, adding that data could be stored in an environment without high security if its encryption is strong enough.
Winning hearts and minds is the biggest challenge facing the adoption of cloud, according to Holland with not only the IT department, but people at all levels of organisations needing to change. The finance department, for example, has traditionally bought technology out of the capital budget - cloud services, bought from opex, represent a different model.
"IT organisations have changed over the years and cloud services is just one of the factors that is changing how the IT department will work on behalf of their business." Guardian Professional.
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