UK developing data tool to track cloud spend across government
The UK’s Government Digital Service (GDS) is developing a ‘cloud cost data solution’ to give a central picture of the total usage and spend on cloud services across the public sector.
The UK public sector currently spends more than £1bn (US$1.36bn) each year on cloud solutions, and this is expected to continue to increase as adoption grows.
The blueprint for a modern digital government, published in January, sets out improvements to spending on digital services and the procurement of third-party services, of which cloud services currently make up a large proportion. It highlights the need to “save money and effort by streamlining the procurement and provision of devices and tools – and cloud and compute resources in the future”.
The cloud cost data solution that GDS is working on aims to address this with near real-time visualisation and reporting on cloud cost data.
“With a consolidated dataset on cloud spend, we will be able to enter into future negotiations with cloud service providers from a position of greater knowledge,” said Katherine Bhambra, senior content designer at GDS, in a blog post. “Most importantly, this will help ensure that taxpayer money is spent wisely on our most critical technology services.”
Read more: New UK digital services plan aims to ‘transform the relationship between citizen and state’
Progress and next steps
In the first 12 weeks of the project, the team onboarded four public sector organisations and integrated multiple cloud service providers to deliver a dashboard with near real-time cloud cost visualisation and reporting.
The next steps are to onboard more organisations and further develop the dashboard according to their use cases and needs. Another goal is to expand the scope of the pilot to additional cloud service providers and potentially software-as-a-service products, including Microsoft 365 licence data.
“As our solution matures and we develop our dashboard reporting, we will be able to more clearly identify the specific benefits of data sharing,” said Bhambra.”The power of this combined data will also be able to better inform our commercial colleagues in negotiating future strategic procurements with cloud service providers, including software-as-a-service.”
Read more: Looking skyward: how governments are moving from cloud-first to cloud-smart
Shared challenge
Smart management of cloud costs is a concern for governments beyond the UK.
A March 2025 US Government Accountability Office report reiterated findings that federal agencies have experienced challenges in tracking and reporting cloud spending and savings data. This includes using inconsistent data to calculate cloud spending and not being clear about the costs they were required to track.
At a Global Government Forum event in late 2024, Canadian digital leaders discussed how to reap the benefits of cloud. Shared Services Canada (SSC) president Scott Jones, highlighted the importance of gathering detailed, real-time data on cloud costs – particularly where, as in the case of SSC, a central body must allocate spending to a wide range of public bodies.
Government of Canada CIO Dominic Rochon added that there is a risk that when public sector cloud users don’t have full visibility of their costs, they can end up wasting resources.
“The analogy we use is that your electricity bills go up if you leave all the lights on in your building when everyone goes away for the weekend,” he said.
About Sarah Wray
Sarah has over 15 years’ experience as a journalist with a specialism in the public sector and topics such as digitalisation and climate action. Sarah was formerly the editor of Cities Today and Smart Cities World, as well as a specialist video-based publication in the aerospace sector. She has also written for publications including Smart Cities Dive, Mobile Europe, Mobile World Live and Computer Weekly.
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