AGIMO touts shared data centre services

The Australian Government Information Management Office (AGIMO) has sought feedback from agencies and industry on a shared service arrangement that would see small agencies offered hosting, disaster recovery and cloud computing services on a pay-as-you-go basis.

The office has released a discussion paper on what it terms Data Centre as a Service, asking smaller agencies what services they might like to consume in order to guide AGIMO's future procurement specifications.

“AGIMO’s DCaaS proposes to offer to smaller agencies that spend less than $2 million per annum on their ICT on a pay-as-you-go basis,” AGIMO said in a blog update.

According to the Gershon review, these small agencies represented only one percent of total IT spend in 07-08.

AGIMO identified disaster recovery, backup, virtualised servers and virtualised storage as services that could be shared.

Specifically, the paper asked smaller agencies which of five levels of service they would prefer to consume on a pay-as-you-go basis:

• Hosting (the basic option, including power, cooling and physical security, to house ICT equipment owned by the agency)
• Disaster Recovery Hosting & Services (As with hosting, but also tailored managed services for disaster recovery)
• Full Outsourced Services (services to agencies using the vendor’s own equipment)
• Full Managed Services; and
• Scalable ICT Delivery (Cloud computing).

AGIMO touted the initiative as “a key opportunity” for industry to canvas procurement recommendations, but insiders suggest the feedback may just as well be used to justify setting up larger agencies such as Centrelink to offer spare capacity to smaller agencies from their facilities, or indeed justify Government proposals to build and/or operate its own whole-of-Government data centres.

Sources told iTnews that DCaaS was not aimed at achieving cost savings but rather geared towards offering better disaster recovery and "setting a path for rationalising common application platforms down the track."

The timing of the announcements appeared to favour a decision around the Federal Budget in May this year, sources said.

AGIMO sought feedback by email to datacentres@finance.gov.au