I’ve got a soft spot for Australia – sure they’re not so good at sports, and they spell culture with a capital “K”, but despite their failings I’ve grown to like them. Part of this came from spending a fair amount of time in Aussie this year running 10 or so CloudCamps all around the place. One of the latter camps was held in Canberra, the federal capital. At that camp there was much discussion with the government people attending whose attitude was pretty much “yeah, cloud is good and all, but we’ll never do public cloud for governmental purposes”.

Roll on only a few months and we see an article in CIO magazine which quotes South Australian CIO, Andrew Mills as saying:

…a current internal trial of cloud providers and continuing negotiations with the likes of Salesforce.com will form the basis of a re-evaluation of the government’s risk guidance frameworks for agencies’ dissemination of information security.

Apparently salesforce.com has been lobbying hard for government organizations to use public cloud solutions, arguing that “storing data in jurisdictions will not contravene domestic laws”. This mirrors some of the great work that Xero is doing across this side of the Tasman, attempting to get the New Zealand Inland Revenue Department to accept cloud storage of financial data as sufficient to meet their requirements.

It’s still early days and there’s much work to be done. But it feels to me like there’s light at the end of the tunnel, by way of governmental acceptance of cloud computing, and that will be good for us all.

Now if only Aussie could work on its rugby form for next years world cup…..