From Chaos to Control: preventing today’s inefficiencies from becoming tomorrow’s legacy

Guest blog by Sharon Moore MBE, CTO Public Sector UK at IBM #techUKSmarterState

Sharon Moore

CTO Public Sector UK, IBM

What if government could prevent a delay in healthcare services & disrupted public services by reclaiming billions in spend? The answer lies in addressing the hidden costs of cloud sprawl.

The Policy Paper A blueprint for modern digital government highlights the issue “Spend is biased towards new programmes with insufficient prioritisation of the effective operation and maintenance of existing systems, especially legacy assets.” While that’s in reference to the dependency of digital services on committed and sustained funding, there’s another angle to consider.

It's easy to deploy new workloads in cloud – as it should be – but that can result in sprawl that’s hard to manage, untracked consumption, and risks to mission critical services. There’s no doubt cloud brings great opportunity and promises flexibility, but government must be sure to get maximum value, reduce waste and stop overspending on unused and orphaned resources or underutilising committed ones.

According to the Institute of Business Value “51% of Government execs say their organisation struggles to maintain the proper balance between funding existing operations and investing in innovation when unexpected changes occur.” With technologies such as AI promising much-needed efficiencies, government must find a way to invest.

Optimising cloud spend is one way to ease the pressure: with 27% of cloud workload estimated to be waste, and with cloud spend by the UK government estimated to be well over £1Billion over the next 3 years, that’s a much-needed sum to reinvest into other digital programmes to increase efficiency and productivity.

However, turning cloud workload off is a hard task. Government systems are burdened with complex interwoven dependencies across technology stacks, blending newer microservices paradigms with legacy technology that strains under the weight of modern demands. One of IBM’s clients has a remediation team that will manually repatriate large workloads not in use, but with micro inefficiencies – the smaller complex workloads – reaching 6 figures, the cost to manually overhaul negates any potential saving. To quote our automation leader in the UK, it’s like “cutting grass with a pair of scissors”.

However, we believe optimisation can happen without reducing citizen experience or departmental services. Enter FinOps: it’s not new but it is urgent. Without immediate intervention, cloud inefficiencies will continue draining resources needed for critical services like education and healthcare, and will stall the transformation of services supporting employment, benefits and taxation.

One government department saved £6m within one year, representing approximately 20% of its cloud spend, and creating opportunity to derive greater value from their existing investments to make citizen and employee services better.

Outside of the public sector, WPP, the world’s largest ad company, has benefited from $2m savings within 3 months - $250K alone within just one weekend - and a 30% reduction in yearly cloud spend. It has also achieved 99% visibility across Azure, AWS, and Google. Another positive consequence of the work is that it’s creating cultural change, bringing their business, finance and engineering teams closer together.

And of course, the Spending Review 2025 aims to drive a “major overhaul in government productivity and efficiency” and targets departments with achieving 5% in savings and efficiencies by 2028-2029.

Government needs to ask two questions:

How do I gain greater visibility of my cloud spend so I can understand what needs my focus?
How can I eliminate cloud wastage safely without disrupting critical services?

From a financials perspective: Government needs a platform that will provide a holistic view of cost and usage, including detailed insights into cloud spend, trends and anomalies. Tooling can provide an aggregated financial view of cloud costs across all major public clouds, including allocating costs across a multi-cloud environment.

Putting the “Ops” into FinOps: AI-enabled automation can expedite savings by efficiently optimising resources via AI-driven sizing recommendations and automated resizing actions; it can provide continuous optimisation and assure application performance. And across legacy on-prem environments too.

Government cloud sprawl is not just a technical concern but a public accountability issue with tangible implications for citizen services. With 27% of cloud workloads wasted, FinOps offers government the tools to cut costs, optimise services, and reinvest savings where it matters most.

Why not schedule a briefing to understand how AI-powered automation can make an impact, and request a demo or a free trial of industry-leading FinOps solutions? Don’t forget to follow the FinOps foundation.

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