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agreed, but sadly British government like expensive and often vastly over-priced contracts with Microsoft, IBM and Oracle is simply because it takes liability away from the government.

If MS fsck up and take a government service offline, then IT managers within the government just say "not our fault, it's one of our service providers". For the government, contracts like this are just another form of outsourcing and thus it would take something monumental and hugely publicly embarrassing before any government body would even consider switching providers - let along bring the services back in house where they really belong.

This is just my experiences when I worked for the British government. Things might be different for the rest of the EU or western world (for their sake, I hope so).

Edited 2012-03-02 09:15 UTC

Not only Governments but also quite a lot of organisations (I worked in a large charity for 15 months and this was rampant). The higher up you get the more you gotta watch your own backside.

Everybody likes to outsource responsibility. Certainly in some Central European places one can see a strong "nobody got fired for using Microsoft or Oracle" of sorts...

...and even when the projects, waaaaay down the line, largely prove to be practical failures - those initially pushing and implementing them moved on, several times already, each time adding another "success" to their CV - and the more expensive, the more lucrative such "successes" are, the better they look on the CV, it seems.

Agreed, that's just embarrassing. But...

...you would only complain and try to get some monetary recognition out of it, but you wouldn't quit using the service. And you know why. This is not just picking up your ball and going, it's picking up the goal posts, the fences, the benches, the lawn and the parking lot, too. I don't claim to know how large the gov's data is on Azure, but I'm sure it is somewhere in the region where you don't move on a whim.

And on top of that 1 day in 366 is probably well within agreed outage levels (I'd guess they have 99.9%, so they would be covered.)

In the short run you're probably right but the contract will be renegotiated at some point and I would make damn sure there's was a viable alternative at that point. Of course, I would probably not have bought into Azure in the first place so it's a bit moot.



Could be but on the other hand, isn't the cloud all about NOT having these kind of problems? You know, scalability, redundancy and all that jazz that the sales rep probably fed the gov't.

"And on top of that 1 day in 366 is probably well within agreed outage levels (I'd guess they have 99.9%, so they would be covered.)"

Let me show you some magic:
100-1/366*100 => 99.73%
99.73>=99.9 => false