Public Sector CIOs: Here’s why you Need a Cloud Strategy
Cost effective, agile, digitally mature delivery of government programs, as well as a workforce supported by modern collaboration tools, are fundamental to Canada’s success in today’s global economy. Your department is no exception, and an effective Cloud strategy is an indispensable part of that digital maturity and of your success moving forward.
While the private sector has been making great strides towards utilizing cloud presence to digitally transform their organizations, many government Departments (federal, provincial and municipal) have been moving more slowly. Although the drivers to move to the cloud and digitally transform are different in the public sector, they are still very real.
Realize the benefits
While reduced infrastructure costs are what attracted early adopters of cloud, surveys now show that factors such as greater scalability, higher availability and shorter time-to-solution are just as significant if not more. A Cloud strategy will allow your department to determine which benefits of the Cloud are most important in transforming the delivery of your programs.
The traditional approach to automating and transforming program delivery has been to undertake large, monolithic, multi-year programs requiring expensive, dedicated infrastructure that takes months to deploy. This approach has an unacceptably high failure rate. The Cloud allows you, in some cases in partnership with your shared IT services provider, to provision infrastructure in minutes, not weeks, and pay only for the capacity you actually use. This enables you to work with the business on innovative changes to program delivery in an agile, iterative manner. Experiment with new ways of doing things with small, integrated business and IT teams, and progressively learn and evolve solutions.
Harness the Data Explosion
Significant improvements to digital program delivery require a Cloud strategy. Your objectives likely include one or more of the following:
- Assessing public sentiment from social media
- Drawing intelligence from “open source” data published by numerous providers on the Internet, from paid subscription sources, or from your own internal systems
- Managing critical program data such as health care information collaboratively with citizens and with key stakeholders (in the case of health care these would include doctors, hospitals/clinics, pharmacies, patients, etc.)
- Combining insights from data stored in multiple formats, including structured data stored in relational or non-relational databases, documents/text, flat files, flat files, XML, tec.
The Cloud facilitates all of the above. It provides virtually limitless low-cost storage, predictive analytics and machine learning (available on a scale not possible on premises) and secure storage of even the most sensitive data. Microsoft’s cloud carries numerous industry and government certifications which attest to its ability to ensure data integrity and availability. These capabilities allow you to collect, store, analyze and share large volumes of data from multiple sources to produce actionable insights, deep analysis, and better decision-making, thereby improving your program delivery.
Develop your Cloud Strategy with Microsoft Services
Achieving the above requires a disciplined approach. The first step is developing a Cloud Strategy that will address the following:
- Your department’s business objectives
- The workloads/applications you will deploy, including prioritization of IaaS, PaaS or SaaS
- Changes needed to your core IT processes to accommodate workloads in the Cloud
- The role of your shared IT services provider as a broker of cloud services(in some cases)
Microsoft Services can help you formulate your Cloud strategy as a firm foundation on which to build as you move to the Cloud. This strategy will be agnostic with respect to who you eventually chose to be the provider of your Cloud services.
Proven Government Digital Transformation Success
Learn more about government digital transformation success in these eBook articles featuring actual experiences of government agencies working through their digital transformation with the help of the Microsoft Cloud.
- Optimize the cost and operating efficiency of government with flexible solutions to harness the transformational power of the cloud – link
- Transform and harness the data explosion to digitize government processes and services for increased efficiency – link
Contact us to get started
If you are a Provincial or Municipal Department CIO and would like to develop a Cloud Strategy, reach out to us on social media: Twitter | LinkedIn | Facebook
