3 top areas for cloud investment
For years, government leaders have heard about the cost savings the cloud can bring. Now, they’re believing it. Governments around the world are becoming cloud-first environments with cloud-based business models. Take the U.S. government, a leader in cloud adoption: A recent IDC report shows that 5 percent of its spending is now on cloud-based technologies and initiatives. In raw numbers, that’s about USD $3 billion. And it won’t stop there. The same report predicts that the U.S. government’s cloud spending could grow to nearly $10 billion over the next few years. With the shift toward the cloud in full force, government officials are asking an important question: Exactly where should their cloud investment be made? Where can they get the most impact with their investment? I see three promising avenues for cloud investment.
1. Software as a Service (SaaS)
With its value widely understood, Software as a Service—or internet-delivered software and services—is growing rapidly, especially among large state, provincial, and federal governments. No longer the domain of early adopters, cloud-based solutions—such as email, document sharing, and instant messaging—are now trusted by more officials, who see the SaaS model as right for them. In Queensland, Australia, nearly 150,000 government employees now work on Microsoft’s cloud-based productivity suite, Office 365. In the U.S.’s Los Angeles County, the number is 100,000. And New South Wales, Australia, has reaped a productivity dividend by moving mobile workers to the cloud, illustrating that cloud-delivered software is now a viable solution for governments.
2. Infrastructure and Platform as a Service (IaaS and PaaS)
Governments are evolving beyond open data and open government to cloud-delivered infrastructure. For example, in the Republic of Estonia, the online version of the State Gazette was successfully moved to the public cloud in a cloud services research project. The public-cloud platform better accommodates their spikes in web traffic—from big announcements, for example—while enabling broad digital participation for citizens. It also provides big savings as governments shift from large, upfront capital expenditures to smaller, periodic operational expenses. Those kinds of benefits drove the recent launch of Azure Government, which is now being used by large government agencies such as the U.S. states of Texas and Alabama to cut operating costs while improving service delivery to citizens.
3. Industry-specific line-of-business apps
I’m seeing a big embrace of tablet devices that are always connected through the cloud, enabling government workers to be effective no matter where they work. These devices run industry-specific solutions such as inspection apps, which are growing in popularity. For example, mobile-enabled inspection apps allow child welfare caseworkers to log data and file reports while conducting in-home inspections. Building inspectors can access blueprints and file reports from construction sites. Food inspectors, like a company in China I recently learned about, can effectively track farm produce from the point of irrigation all the way to grocery store shelves. This is interesting because the more of these systems we create, the faster they’ll scale, eventually landing in the hands of every government worker around the world.
What’s driving the explosive cloud growth in governments? In short, trust. Cloud-driven operations that were once considered risky are now benefitting from security-hardened devices and platforms, and widespread adoption of industry standards. Those things are a big part of our focus at Microsoft. It’s why we meet rigorous standards like FedRAMP and Criminal Justice Information Services (CJIS) in the U.S. and Article 29 Working Party in the European Union. These types of certifications validate cloud providers’ data protection and privacy practices. We also rolled out the Trustworthy Computing initiative in 2002. My advice to any government leader is to make sure that your cloud service providers meet similar privacy and security standards. Your government’s information is too valuable for anything less.
Have a comment or opinion on this post? Let us know @Microsoft_Gov. Or e-mail us at ongovernment@microsoft.com.
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