"That situation has changed. We took a leading role from the beginning and it was important to us to remain focused on our vision and the goal of building a real G-Cloud service - think Amazon but built for the UK public sector, hosted in an environmentally-friendly UK data centre, operated by a UK company."

The to halve the number of security levels it uses internally from six to three in an attempt to simplify the accreditation process for suppliers looking to provide services to the public sector.

It applies a Business Impact Level (IL) classification to suppliers to indicate the security level of their services. IL0 (protected) is the lowest level of security, while IL6 (top secret) is the highest. IL2 is often the minimum requirement for government services, for example, it is the minimum requirement for providers bidding for network contracts.

"The government has a complex security marking scheme, there are six levels. We are trying to simplify that to just three to see if we can get most of government in the lowest level for most of its business," said Andy Nelson, government CIO.