Towards the last lap of 2022, the US Defense Department awarded a potentially USD 9 billion contract to Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Oracle for building their cloud capabilities. The initiative was christened the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability or JWCC. It was a culmination of a series of high-profile discussions, controversies, and legal battles following the previous government’s decision to award the USD 10 billion Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) contract of Pentagon to Microsoft.
But the key conclusion from this saga is that irrespective of JWCC or JEDI, the government’s objective is clear; their most critical, strategic, and tactical digital assets must move into the cloud.
A Changing Perception of the Cloud
The US Defense Department example was just one example of how public sector organizations across the world are changing their perspectives towards cloud migration. In the past, concerns surrounding security, data ownership, and privacy were often detrimental to the transition of government digital channels to the cloud. But over time, they have been mighty impressed with the strides made by private enterprises in handling data from billions of consumers in high-performing and secure cloud environments. In fact, Gartner estimates that 85% of all organizations will embrace a cloud-first principle by 2025.
COVID-19 as a Catalyst for the Change
But it is not just the mileage from successful enterprise cloud transition that fueled the desire from public sector organizations. The most significant catalyst that accelerated the push towards cloud from the government sector was the COVID-19 pandemic.
When the pandemic hit its peak, both federal and state had to bring in a slew of support programs for citizens to ensure that they have access to critical and essential services like extended insurance coverage, direct monetary support, unemployment benefits, and other aid services. Since mobility was severely restricted with lockdowns, nearly all support services had to be undertaken digitally, which led to a massive surge in the use of government digital channels.
This was when most government departments realized the trouble, they were in due to the overpopulation of legacy systems in their technology stack. In fact, some did not even have proper digital systems in place. One of the exemplifications of the same was the news of nearly 16,000 COVID cases going unreported in England due to the use of MS Excel for managing data.
Moving to the Cloud Is an Imperative and Not an Option
The bottom line here is that most public sector technology is outdated, aging, and was never built for handling a scale of use witnessed during the pandemic. This was a critical moment for governments to take note of the lessons from the pandemic and look for more reliable, scalable, and adaptable solutions for the evolving needs of citizens.
Naturally, the cloud became the number one choice. But it was not just the age-old benefits of scalability and affordability that favored the move to the cloud. In fact, public sector organizations have new and innovative ways to leverage the cloud to transform their entire operations, such as:
Leverage Unmatched Availability
Most cloud service providers offer guaranteed availability for their offerings, thereby allowing government bodies to build highly reliable and always-on services that the public can access 24*7 and all through the year.
Drive New Innovations
With the cloud, government agencies can easily deploy services that leverage advanced abilities like high-end data analytics, artificial intelligence, IoT, etc., at ease. Most cloud providers have their own inherent supporting services that offer these capabilities natively, thereby eliminating the effort needed to build them.
The use of APIs can help integrate multiple service capabilities across datasets, devices, and supporting libraries into apps seamlessly. The underlying cloud framework allows organizations to build cloud-native apps easily and launch them for public use faster.
Drive Performance Improvement
The shift to the cloud brings in a great deal of flexibility in infrastructure and integrated support services for applications. This allows public sector organizations to modernize their digital channels and improve their performance for end users by automating core operations like data management, scaling, resource provisioning, and much more. In short, they can be more agile and responsive to citizen demands.
Become Data-Centric
With the resources needed to support high-end digitization in place via the cloud, government organizations can invest in scaling their strategic data initiatives. It becomes easy to harness and unify data from multiple departments and make it available to end-users in desired formats or via services across both physical and digital channels.
Every step of a citizen’s journey with the government can be made data-centric by tools deployed on the cloud that help with data acquisition, storage, filtering, analysis, and reporting.
Wrapping Up
We are moving into the era of new normal where citizens have embraced digital as a way of life in almost all areas like retail, finance, education, and entertainment. At this juncture, public sector organizations cannot risk being left out of the race to serve the needs of citizens digitally as much as possible.
The cloud is their answer to unlock new experiences and capabilities in digital transformation but proceeding in that direction requires a greater understanding of how to play with the cloud, establish governance, and leverage its potential. This is where government organizations need a knowledgeable technology partner like Trinus to plan, support, and engineer their roadmap into a cloud-first approach. Get in touch with us to know more.