Gartner: NZ shows wise approach to cloud

Gartner is praising the New Zealand government's approach towards its cloud programme, calling it sensible and with a clear purpose.

"New Zealand starts from the business case," says Andrea Di Maio, VP at Gartner Research.

"Asking very simple questions: does it makes sense? Where? For whom? Migrating how?"

Di Maio says the registration of interest released last week by the Department of Internal Affairs, shows the government is not obsessed with the cloud but instead is using supplier expertise to develop a business case.

"Let's the vendors walk the talk," he says. "Isn't it brilliant?"

Di Maio also talks about cloud computing in other governments.

"Interesting to compare this approach to what we have seen elsewhere in the past .... The US government has aggressively pursued cloud through the early establishment of an application store, a couple of tenders for IaaS and for email, and the establishment of a common resource for certification and accreditation of service providers (FedRAMP)."

He says Australia's strategy was mostly developed internally, but with an open consultation period.

Di Maio has praised the New Zealand government's technology policy before for its infrastructure-as-a-service procurement, and most recently the government's social media policy.