How Cloud Services Can Drive Innovation in the Public Sector

07 Jul How Cloud Services Can Drive Innovation in the Public Sector

Posted at 07:00h in Public Sector by Simon Spencer

In this article, we’re going to go over the technological needs of the public sector — looking at how the cloud can have many benefits throughout different parts of the public sector and help you take the next step into the future.

The State of Technology in the Public Sector

While providing great public services, the public sector has benefitted from knowledgeable tech enthusiasts providing great digital services for their specific subsectors.

However, on a wider scale, the public sector has faltered in introducing digital solutions into public organisations. In the 2021 State of the Digital Nation report, five key findings were made regarding public sector organisations and technology —

Organisations are struggling to adapt: 99% of respondents to the State of the Digital Nation survey said that they saw changes to their services and goals (outside of the impact of COVID-19) through 2020 and 2021, 95% of which have struggled with those changes.
Digital transformation is a priority, but ineffectively: Of the 95% of organisations with a digital transformation strategy, 29% consider it fully implemented. This kind of intent without delivery is part of why public sector organisations are struggling to keep up with the digital world.
Poor digital transformation environment: While valuing the benefits of digital transformation, organisations are finding wider issues that stunt digital transformation throughout their organisation. 99% of organisations using SaaS applications report challenges and only 9% report that data is compatible across all applications.
Financial Sustainability: The day-to-day of a business can be costly. With 95% of organisations looking to shave off costs wherever they can due to the financial impact of the COVID pandemic, leveraging cost and technology to help cut costs is vital.
Transformation is clear: While organisations struggle sometimes, the idea of digital transformation within the workplace is clear — people know that data and analytics are a vital part of digital transformation and automation is part of the future.

Benefits of Migrating to the Cloud for the Public Sector

Improve Communication & Collaboration

Any organisation thrives on good communication and collaboration capabilities. The cloud fully enables communication and collaboration throughout your organisation in a flexible manner.

Collaboration has never been easier — with your organisation’s files in the cloud, sharing them with collaborators and colleagues is simple. In programs such as Microsoft Office, you can also collaborate freely in real-time, making collaboration far more productive and efficient.

Communications are vital to any organisation — the cloud unlocks communication abilities by giving free and versatile access to your organisation’s systems wherever they are, allowing them to remotely communicate with others while never losing the ability to access what they need.

Reduce IT Expenditure

On-prem systems are costly. The capital expenditure that comes with buying and maintaining the server hardware — as well as buying hardware that will perform well enough for your team to use — is quite expensive.

The cloud completely mitigates this, as you’re never paying for any hardware — simply for the service provided by the cloud provider. This works out cheaper in the long run, as the many costs associated with on-prem hardware simply disappear — meaning you can allocate that expenditure elsewhere.

Improve Security Posture

Modern organisations worldwide are constantly under threat of attack. Especially in the public sector — where organisations oversee critical services — security planning is becoming increasingly important.

The cloud naturally improves your security posture significantly. As your data is stored on the servers of the cloud provider, they’re basically impossible to breach and so you can ensure that your organisation won’t have any physical data breaches and extractions.

Increase Employee Productivity

The cloud enables employees to work more flexibly and with more versatility, including remote working and working from any device.

This means they can ultimately be more productive, as working how they want will ultimately boost morale and efficiency which will be beneficial for everyone.

Ability to Scale

Just like on-prem hardware is expensive, it’s also very difficult to scale. This is because you can’t really scale down, and scaling up means buying more hardware that your organisation won’t be able to scale back down.

With a cloud-based service, scaling up and down is a matter of a few clicks. There’s no need to invest in hardware, and you can make your spending far more versatile and suited to your needs by scaling effectively.

Make Data-Driven Decisions

Data is one of the world’s most important resources, and so being able to fully access data that is enabled by the cloud will help you make more informed decisions for your organisation.

Cloud-enabled data services and analytics will let you set up automated data tracking algorithms and other AI-powered services that will even further help your organisation truly prosper.

How We Can Help

The public sector isn’t adjusting to technological advancements and needs as well as it could be — migrating to the cloud is one of the major ways that organisations can unlock their full potential and take a step into the modern technological world.

if you’re looking to get started with the cloud, reach out to us. We’re here to help through the whole process and our team of experts will provide you with a guiding hand to ensure that your business truly prospers going forward.