Could the Central Bank or the Governement in a country adopt Total Information Outsourcing (TIO) and outsource its servers, its core applications and the operations of its information systems to foreign companies ? Intuition says no, but intuition could be wrong.

Let us review a two examples.

The first example is the one of an supranational organisation located in a country which suffers from dramatic shortages in gas, electricity and skilled IT staff. This organisaton requires a full IT system in the shortest possible lead time. Building infrastructure and capacity for such an environment would likely take 1 or 2 years because of the local regulations, business habbits and difficult working environment. With TIO, this lead time can be reduced to 2 months. By sourcing a couple of laptops and a couple of ThurayaDSL access points, and by subscribing to a TIO provider, it is possible to provide a complete information system together with its management, support and training. All applications could be provided as open source with Total Data Portability SLAs, which means that the whole system could be later hosted by the supranational organisation itself. TIO is in the case is clearly a quick win, with no strategic consequences on the future thanks to source code access and TDP.

The second example is the one of a national organisation in charge of hosting servers for a national government. This organisation is managed by civil servants with the help of engineers and technicians who are listed on the payroll of outsourcing suppliers. Overall, the hosting service provided by this organisation is 10 times more expensive than the usual price of private ISPs, with a lower level of quality and even fewer options in service. And because it is operated by many engineers and technicians who are not civil servants and were not screened, it is not very safe from a strategic intelligence point of view. Let us imagine what an ISP company could offer: dedicated room, dedicated network, dedicated servers, dedicated supervision software with source code access, dedicated staff going through screening procedures defined by the governement, joint supervision by ISP staff and civil servants, remote data backup in a military base. This example shows that TIO can sometimes provide better service and higher security and lower cost, even for strategic governement infrastructure.

As long as staff which operates TIO goes through the same screening and supervision procedures as the regular staff of an organisation and as long as a capacity building path exists to replace a TIO service by an equivalent self managed information system, TIO can be the right solution for any organisation.