Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff has slammed the UK government for its failure to embrace the public cloud.
Benioff, who yesterday met Cabinet Office minster Francis Maude, said the UK government was lagging far behind the US in the move to the cloud.
He pointed out that utilisation rates in government data centres were in single figures and said efforts to improve this were too focussed on virtualisation and G-cloud – the government’s private cloud.
It is a “virtual machine that is not well executed,” he said. He sharply criticised government data centres for not moving to multi-tenanted infrastructure.
More important though was to embrace the public cloud, he insisted.
“The government should stop hiding behind the private cloud,” the Salesforce CEO stated.
The UK needs “to get aggressive about public cloud,” said Benioff. He highlighted the fact that Salesforce.com was now certified by the US government as a secure public cloud provider.
Benioff said Salesforce.com would open a London data centre next year and that it was running final tests on a Tokyo data centre, which would go live shortly.
