Articles from Top stories

A draft strategy paper from the Cabinet Office has pointed to Web 2.0, cloud computing and service-oriented architecture as areas for exploitation over the next five years. A leaked version of Government ICT Strategy: New world, new challenges, new opportunities outlines how the government is thinking about harnessing IT up to 2015. It says that many new technologies will become mainstream in that time, but that the three it names are of particular interest. Web 2.0 will provide the basis to improve public sector interaction with citizens and businesses; cloud technology will enable the development of different business models for the procurement, use and reuse of applications; and service-oriented architecture (SOA) — which provides a set of principles and concepts defining how services interact with each other — can enable the delivery of the 'G Cloud' and an online store of government applications. (Read Full Article)

The leader of Parliament's IT committee has backed a consortium calling for a £1bn fund to stimulate investment in green tech and shared services. MP Andrew Miller, chairman of the Parliamentary Information Technology Committee (Pitcom), supported calls for the government to establish the fund, which would be used to loan money to central and local government organisations. The loans would be used by public sector bodies to invest in green technologies and would later be repaid using savings generated by the tech. (Read Full Article)

BT is about to formally launch a virtualised infrastructure service called BT Virtual Data Centre, which will form the basis of its cloud-computing strategy. VDC involves the virtualisation of servers, storage, networks and security delivered to customers via an online portal as cloud-based services. On Thursday, BT's Global Services division announced the customer rollout of VDC, which will initially target multinational corporate customers and the public sector. "VDC is the basis of our cloud-computing offering," Neil Sutton, BT Global Services's product chief, told ZDNet UK on Thursday. "We've begun to deliver communications-as-a-service and hosted services for voice, unified communications and CRM, and we see a roadmap where people want to be able to provision an infrastructure end-to-end. We want to deliver those things as a service in a predictable and flexible manner." The company has been using VDC internally since early last year to cut costs within ... (Read Full Article)