Government agencies and non-profit organisations tend to lag behind commercial enterprises when it comes to adopting new technology but the pace of public sector cloud adoption is continuing to increase. There are many reasons behind this accelerating trend, the most important of which we are going to cover in this brief article. If you are developing a cloud migration strategy for a public sector organisation in Australia, you will almost certainly be able to identify with some or possibly all of these key motivating factors.
3 key reasons for public sector organisations to migrate to the Cloud
A comprehensive analysis, covering all of the reasons for cloud migrations in the public sector, would run to many thousands of words. To produce a more concise and manageable guide, we have therefore decided to confine ourselves to what we see as the top 3 reasons for government agencies and non-profits to consider cloud migration very seriously.
- Lower operating costs
Funding is a huge issue for almost all public sector organisations, which is why any opportunity to save money is taken very seriously. By migrating IT infrastructure and services to the Cloud, it is possible to reduce running costs by a significant amount. With no need to worry about new capital expenditure and all assets being maintained by the cloud service provider, future costs are more predictable and, if the migration is managed efficiently, much lower than they might otherwise be. When compared to the cost and complexity of continuing to run on-premises servers and legacy applications, the Cloud is a very appealing alternative for any organisation with a limited IT budget.
- Availability/location independence
By migrating key apps to the Cloud, government agencies can make them more easily available to remote workers and the citizens they provide services to. Hyperscale cloud platforms include industry-leading identity and access management tools, which means these apps can be safely accessed over any reliable Internet connection. With the current trend of home working looking set to continue for the foreseeable future, secure access to client data for government agency staff is an important consideration that is sure to convince more organisations to migrate to the Cloud in the coming years.
- Minimal downtime
With applications and services hosted on servers located in government offices, hardware failure can lead to extended downtime. This downtime has the potential to reduce overall efficiency and prevent staff from accessing the information they need when working in the field. Cloud platforms, on the other hand, host apps, services and data on virtual servers, which means that when one machine goes down, another can step into its place immediately. For public sector organisations that rely on being able to access key data throughout the working day, the greater reliability offered by cloud solutions is a very important benefit.
For public sector organisations in all areas of Australia, cloud solutions have the potential to facilitate efficiency improvements across the board and lower the operational costs associated with complex IT systems.
