GDS: All change for G-Cloud 9

Once DOS framework is up and running, government will turn its attention to G-Cloud

The Government Digital Service (GDS) has begun the process of working out what future iterations of G-Cloud will look like, and they could be much different from today's.

G-Cloud is currently on its seventh iteration, with the eighth due to go live in the summer. G-Cloud sits under the Digital Marketplace umbrella alongside the soon-to-be-launched Digital Outcomes and Specialist (DOS) framework. The latter has undergone a significant transformation from being the Digital Services framework, a process which has taken about a year.

In a blog, the GDS said because of the time spent revamping the DOS framework, it has left G-Cloud alone. But its attentions will soon be turned back to the larger of the two frameworks.

"We've been focused on developing the end-to-end buyer journey for DOS and haven't made significant changes to G-Cloud 8," the blog said. "Instead, we've prioritised a G-Cloud 9 'discovery' to find out how future iterations of G-Cloud should evolve."

The discovery process consists of determining users' needs and how services meet those, as well as analysing current performance.

Once DOS is live, which is expected to happen this month, buyers will be able to procure specialist services from the framework. This, GDS said, means the "specialist cloud services" (SCS) element of G-Cloud could be phased out.

"We know that buyers have used G-Cloud to find specialists in the past. We hope to remove the overlap between the two frameworks," said GDS.

Among other things, the GDS hopes the discovery process will help it evaluate if the four categories into which G-Cloud is split – IaaS, PaaS, SaaS and SCS – are still relevant.

Security elements of the framework will come under scrutiny as well as how G-Cloud can help "simplify the transition from lengthy and expensive legacy IT contracts to cloud services".