Indian IT companies could benefit from the UK Government's move to reduce the overall information communication and technology spends of individual departments, a top government official has hinted.

Indications are that each department of the UK will aim to reduce overall IT costs by anywhere in excess of 15 per cent.

The idea is to standardise procurement of commoditised hardware, consolidate multiple data centres and move to an internal private cloud, Mr Bill McCluggage, Deputy Chief Information Officer of UK, said on the sidelines of the Nasscom India Leadership Forum. Put simply, private cloud entails the delivery of infrastructure as a service to a restricted set of customers, usually within a single organisation.

“Many governments departments would be looking to reduce their IT spends in line with their budgets reductions over the spending review period,” he told Business Line .

Mr McCluggage said the UK Government has been a big proponent of IT outsourcing and that it would ensure a level playing field for Indian vendors.

Last year, Mr McCluggage was quoted in the British press saying that IT projects across all departments were being reassessed in a bid to cut the bill for Central Government's IT spend, currently pegged at over £7 billion – nearly half of the £16.9 billion overall IT spend.

UK's ambitious project involves building a dozen secured data centres, each priced at £250 million. Of the total project, the cloud component alone is valued at £300 million, the previous UK CIO, Mr John Suffolk, had said last year.

According to McCluggage, there are six major public sector departments that are at the cusp of adopting a cloud computing strategy. These are Departments of Work and Pensions; Revenue and Customs; Justice; Health and National Health Services; and Defence.

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