Top courts threaten federal government with legal action over new IT rules

This article makes no sense. Buying hardware and what informatin is stored on that hardware are two completely different animals. This article says now the courts et al must go through shared services to gain economies of scale when purchacing hardware. Then goes on a rant about how information can't be shared.

I think someone needs to either do some reading, or have a drink! I don't see an issue at all!

Yea, the article is a little short on detail.

The trend now in governments (federal and provincial) is to go to a single department just for IT services. All other departments then 'lease' service from them for their infrastructure. In the article, having to 'buy' equipment through the shared IT service also means that the shared IT department will maintain and service the equipment. The ministry just gets to pay for it.

But it may also mean that the equipment is shared with another Ministry. So Justice buys a SAN, and that SAN may also contain information from Children's services and Environment for example. Normally, this wouldn't even be noticed by the individual ministries - but when it is noticed, it can be really bad.

For example, in an outage. The SAN power supply fails, and suddenly critical data disappears from multiple ministries. Or a lawsuit is filed, and an order comes to segregate and store data for Justice, but records involving Children get mixed up because someone isn't careful.

The same here for the Supreme court. They are worried that using 'shared services' can cause them to be dependent on outside ministries, and compromise the integrity of their systems.

I speak from experience here, as a number of contracts I've been involved with have had similar, and extremely bad experiences. The ministry I work with right now is actively fighting the 'cost cutting' measure, because is really does nothing to cut costs and ends up being a logistical nightmare. The 'shared service' can be a benefit to things like daily printing or email. But they really are terrible at things like applications developed in house over the last 30 years, or complicated things like Oracle support.

If you look at big companies like Google, they don't run shared services for things like Search, Gmail and Groups. They are independent for a reason. And it's not to be a higher cost to the company!