Hybrid IT and cloud have become critical in the digital transformation of government. When implemented effectively, Hybrid IT and cloud services present many opportunities, including flexibility, improved collaboration and scalability.
Analysts predict the growth in enterprise IT spend for cloud-based offerings will be faster than the growth in traditional, non-cloud spending through 2022 (
Gartner Market Insight: Cloud Shift 2018 to 2022
). This shift of enterprise IT spend, coupled with the speed of innovation of IT cloud services, has seen 50% of organisations pivot to cloud networking.
Barriers to cloud adoption
While cloud adoption is accelerating, there are still barriers preventing government from capitalising on the hybrid IT economy. In the government sector, many Australian agencies are adopting cloud services to facilitate digital transformation. But while IaaS, SaaS and cloud-first are increasingly common today, many government agencies still find it difficult to move their core systems to the cloud, and to modernise, manage and secure their complex hybrid cloud and IT environments.
Other barriers to a cloud-first approach include perceived risks around security, integrity and availability of critical government systems across cloud deployments. Above all else, government agencies strive to protect the information of citizens and the assurance that data stored in the cloud is secure, accurate and reliable.
Benefits of cloud adoption
For government organisations looking to transform or upgrade their current systems, the implementation of an automated, cloud-managed infrastructure has significant benefits. Replacing traditional on-premise systems with “evergreen” type service offerings will provide huge upsides and workload shifts. IT departments will no longer be required to purchase, deploy and maintain computing hardware and software in-house. Instead, cloud services can be set up proficiently and scaled and updated without involvement from IT.
Realising the full power of the cloud to fuel transformation also requires refactoring applications to modern, secure architectures (that leverage PaaS capabilities such as containers, serverless computing and cloud-native platforms. Success with such cloud-native approaches isn’t just about transforming IT infrastructure; a complete mindset shift is required in combination to achieve true success with cloud and hybrid IT.
