Hat tip to the ever-readable blogger Paul Ramsey (not the former BC finance minister) for bringing to light a BC Government agency, CloudBC, that frankly we had never heard of.

Ramsey often writes on computer issues in government, and, bluntly, there have been many expensive boondoggles in that sphere over the past several years.

CloudBC is apparently a provincial government agency that was set up to manage cloud computing options for the public sector.

From Ramsey’s blog (and, please, go read the whole thing):

The CloudBC initiative to “facilitate the successful adoption of cloud computing services in the British Columbia public sector” is now a little over a year old, and is up to no good.

The eligibility request currently online1 for CloudBC is a master-work of institutional over-reach:

• Only CloudBC approved services2 can be sold to the BC public sector.
• Approved services will add an ‘administration fee’ to all their billing3 to the BC public sector and remit that fee to CloudBC.
• The fee will be 2%.

And in exchange for that 2% of all cloud services, CloudBC will provide what in return?

Well, they’ll set the eligibility list, so the BC public sector will be literally paying for someone to tell them “no”. Setting the list will include a few useful services like FOIPPA reviews and making the vendors cough up promises to follow various international standards that nobody reads and few people audit. So that’s something. But mostly just more reasons to say “no”.

Ramsey also points out that provincial law forbids the government from using non-Canadian servers to house any of our personal information, so CloudBC’s reach will be very limited.

And he notes that they are late on virtually every public milestone they have set, including the fact they can’t even get their own website up and running (due in June 2016).

A little more digging shows CloudBC is a fully owned BC Government agency:

CloudBC is a collaboration of 14 public sector organizations including the Ministry of Technology, Innovation and Citizens Services; regional health authorities and several Crown agencies. CloudBC is administered by government and has been established to support the B.C. public sector’s efforts to adopt modern cloud-based business and technology services.

Yet we couldn’t find any financial documents on costs to taxpayers, or service plans. Guess we’ll be headed to the web ourselves to file some Freedom of Information requests.