19 Nov 2020

Becoming a Digital Pioneer in the Public Sector

Guest blog: Justin Day, Cloud Gateway, shares how the public sector approached cloud transformation before Covid-19 & how to benchmark cloud strategy.

Earlier this year Cloud Gateway worked on a research project in conjunction with Vysiion and techUK to analyse cloud adoption in the public sector. The research aimed to gather responses and opinions from IT leaders around the Government’s Cloud First programme, cloud strategy and their cloud adoption status.

The results from the survey brought back some interesting findings. 79% of public sector organisations had correctly identified that the Government’s Cloud First policy directed them to ‘think’ public cloud first. Responses also showed an awareness of hybrid cloud options which could cater to appropriate levels of security, depending on the organisation’s needs and sensitivity of the data being handled. However in contrast to this, only 59% of organisations considered cloud a ‘Very Important’ part of their overall digital strategy at that time.

At the time, 32% of the respondents hadn’t yet defined what their organisation’s cloud strategy would be. That was a surprise, however in view of that it wasn’t surprising to learn that 45% of organisations had not yet decided how to implement cloud technology.

One result which stood out to me was that 53% of public sector organisations stated that their cloud strategy would take 24+ months to execute and deploy. A vast majority of respondents - 77% - said that cloud transformation was more than a year away.

It’s worth mentioning here that this is of course talking about the beginning of 2020 where the working world - and the world in entirety - looked like a very different place. The Covid-19 pandemic has accelerated cloud adoption across the public sector and private sector. Entire workforces were told to work from home. Public sector organisations faced huge challenges in continuing to provide essential public services with a remote workforce. In the face of overnight changes, IT leaders had to fast track tactical cloud deployments, putting aside challenges in the short term to cater for operational shifts.

One thing that is a particular pain point for public sector organisations is that there is a lot of old tech around. That infrastructure is responsible for supplying some essential public-facing services. As we’ve settled into a remote working practice, IT leaders now have the opportunity to integrate tactical cloud deployments into their overall cloud strategy. Now, with the benefit of experience at how obstacles can be overcome, IT leaders within public sector organisations have the chance to take a step back and make strategic decisions on cloud strategy and transformation programmes.

Cloud Gateway and Vysiion want to help IT leaders understand what it takes to implement these changes and become a true Digital Pioneer in the public sector. Benchmark cloud strategy and adoption against peers and understand what it really takes to become a Digital Pioneer in a post-Covid world.

Take the survey to share where you are in your journey and receive results to discover what steps to take to become a Digital Pioneer – or whether you’re already paving the way for others. Results will be shared with all survey participants.

By Justin Day, CEO and Co-founder of Cloud Gateway