Governments reap cloud rewards
It’s widely accepted that cloud computing is transforming organisations across all industries, and affording business that adopt cloud technologies massive savings as well as other benefits. The private sector was first to realise this and capitalise on cloud’s numerous benefits, but government entities are also starting to realise how cloud can benefit them. “Scalable, on-demand cloud computing services can help government entities to focus on mission-critical objectives, while boosting innovation and lowering IT costs,” says Richard Vester, director of Cloud Services at EOH. “There can be little doubt that the past five years’ recession has seen organisations having to tighten their belts, and stretch their budgets further than before. This has affected the way in which their solutions are deployed, and driven the need for optimised business models, and closer scrutiny on performance and delivery. The need to get more for less has boosted the adoption of hosted and shared services in a big way.” Cloud computing provides tremendous benefits in terms of both immediate and long term cost savings for governments. “Cloud offers services on a “pay-as-you-go” and “pay-per-use” model, eliminating the upfront costs associated with in buying IT tools, solutions and hardware,” explains Vester. Adoption of cloud can also be extremely beneficial in light of fast growing urbanisation. “With more and more of the population living in urban areas, officials in city planning are struggling to keep up with and manage these burgeoning populations. Meeting the needs of a fast-growing population demands careful planning, preparation and distribution of resources. Cloud can be of huge benefit here, as it standardises and pools technological resources, automating many functions that were traditionally accomplished manually. This frees up time and human resources to boost service delivery across the board.”Moreover, over and above cost containment, he says cloud is allowing governments to be more innovative, to improve flexibility and boost operational efficiencies through the consolidation of their IT. “IT consolidation is helping governments to increase efficiencies and lower the cost of ownership. Through virtualisation and cloud adoption, government departments are reducing their server footprint, and consolidating their data centres to lower hardware costs as well as energy consumption which is a major expense.”
According to Vester, governments are also seeing huge savings through shared services. “Sharing IT services not only greatly reduces costs, it improves efficiencies. Solutions such as Software as a Service (SaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) include other features such as asset management and monitoring tools, and removing the need for additional services. In addition, the shared, cloud model offers greater flexibility particularly in terms of capacity – where services can be added as needed. In this way, government departments can instantly respond to changing business demands.” He cites another area where governments are reaping cloud benefits as being improved service delivery to citizens. “Most governments offer citizens the ability to access their rates, electricity consumption, vehicle licensing, tax and suchlike online. The cloud model gives citizens greater control, and allows them not only to monitor their use more carefully, but improves citizen awareness.” Finally, he says cloud goes a long way towards eliminating technological obsolescence. “The shortening upgrade cycles and constant stream of new products, upgrades, hardware and software, is seeing technology becoming obsolete sooner than ever before. Moreover, companies who opt to stick with the same old technology for years, in order to save costs, are at great risk of being left behind. Cloud helps tackle this issue, as the risk is taken from the organisation, and put in the hands of the service provider.
