Is the government’s cloud-first approach failing?

Ever since its intro­duc­tion in 2013, the government’s so-called cloud-first pol­i­cy has been at the heart of the pub­lic sector’s dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion efforts. Put sim­ply, the pol­i­cy means that bod­ies seek­ing to update their tech­nol­o­gy should eval­u­ate cloud-based sys­tems before con­sid­er­ing any oth­er option. But there is a strong argu­ment that apply­ing such an approach across the board, regard­less of con­text, is unwise.

Hewlett Packard Enter­prise (HPE), a tech­nol­o­gy ven­dor that pro­motes a hybrid approach to IT adop­tion, mount­ed a pub­lic­i­ty cam­paign in Sep­tem­ber that described Westminster’s cloud-first direc­tive as “inap­pro­pri­ate” for the pub­lic sec­tor. HPE argued that the fric­tion between the pol­i­cy and the real­i­ties of fol­low­ing it had “left cloud strate­gies dis­joint­ed and incom­plete or, at worst, com­plete­ly stalled” in some cas­es.

This is because a pub­lic cloud is not always the most effi­cient or appro­pri­ate repos­i­to­ry for work­loads and data. More than three-quar­ters (78%) of pub­lic bod­ies pro­vide ser­vices that are unsuit­able for migra­tion to a pub­lic cloud, accord­ing to gov­ern­ment fig­ures request­ed by HPE under the Free­dom of Infor­ma­tion Act 2000. More­over, 63% of pub­lic-sec­tor organ­i­sa­tions have yet to adopt a ded­i­cat­ed cloud strat­e­gy. More than 70% of their infra­struc­ture and 73% of their data remains on the premis­es.

“The pol­i­cy man­dat­ed where work­loads and data should be with­out pre­scrib­ing how to do it,” notes Matt Har­ris, HPE’s vice-pres­i­dent of sales in the UK. “In many cas­es, it failed to antic­i­pate the long tail of lega­cy IT, entrenched out­sourc­ing and a lack of skills across the sec­tor. It spec­i­fied a des­ti­na­tion with­out address­ing the steep moun­tain to climb on the way there.”

Does the pub­lic sec­tor need to stop pur­su­ing the cloud-first approach, or is it mere­ly a ques­tion of fol­low­ing the pol­i­cy in a more effec­tive way? And is it only a tech­no­log­i­cal issue, or are deep­er cul­tur­al fac­tors also at play? 

Tracey Jes­sup is chief dig­i­tal and infor­ma­tion offi­cer at the Par­lia­men­tary Dig­i­tal Ser­vice, which helps peo­ple work­ing at the Palace of West­min­ster with their IT needs. She reports that the cloud enables her organ­i­sa­tion to deliv­er new ser­vices cost-effec­tive­ly. 

“Pub­lic-sec­tor organ­i­sa­tions should be focused on their core pur­pose, not on run­ning tech­nol­o­gy. The adop­tion of cloud ser­vices gives them an oppor­tu­ni­ty to shift the bur­den of run­ning com­plex sys­tems to spe­cial­ist sup­pli­ers,” Jes­sup says. “The pub­lic sec­tor can also face sig­nif­i­cant chal­lenges in recruit­ing tech­ni­cal spe­cial­ists. Cloud sys­tems pro­vide a way to access those tech­nolo­gies with­out need­ing those spe­cial­ists.”

But adopt­ing cloud ser­vices isn’t some­thing that can be done overnight, of course. “To tru­ly exploit the ben­e­fits, appli­ca­tions need to be redesigned and pri­or invest­ments in lega­cy tech­nolo­gies need to be realised before the finan­cial case stacks up. Every organ­i­sa­tion will be at a dif­fer­ent stage in its jour­ney to the cloud,” she adds.

The crit­ics’ argu­ment is that a one-size-fits-all approach is not applic­a­ble. Some pub­lic-sec­tor bod­ies may find cloud sys­tems too dif­fi­cult to imple­ment and/or lack the required skills or pro­cure­ment process­es. In oth­er cas­es, owing to the char­ac­ter­is­tics of the lega­cy sys­tems they have, they sim­ply won’t be able to deliv­er on the cloud-first pol­i­cy.

Nonethe­less, the pub­lic sector’s progress towards cloud com­put­ing has accel­er­at­ed dur­ing the pan­dem­ic, accord­ing to research con­duct­ed late last year for the Cloud Indus­try Forum. In the pub­lic sec­tor, 49% of organ­i­sa­tions had increased their cloud adop­tion as a direct result of the Covid cri­sis. Among those that had already migrat­ed, 97% of deci­sion-mak­ers said that the cloud was play­ing an impor­tant part in their response to the pan­dem­ic, with 42% describ­ing its role as crit­i­cal.

The forum’s CEO, Alex Hilton says: “Look­ing at cloud ben­e­fits, 65% of respon­dents in the pub­lic sec­tor cit­ed the quick tran­si­tion from office to home­work­ing it enabled. In addi­tion, 55% men­tioned how it helped the organ­i­sa­tion to be agile, while the same per­cent­age said it had enabled oper­a­tions to con­tin­ue as usu­al through­out the upheaval. It’s clear that short-term advan­tages were deliv­ered ear­ly in the pan­dem­ic, which will trans­late into greater organ­i­sa­tion­al resilience in the long term.”

Accord­ing to research by the Inter­na­tion­al Data Cor­po­ra­tion, despite the wide­spread adop­tion of pub­lic clouds, 70% of all appli­ca­tions remain out­side them. This is down to sev­er­al fac­tors, includ­ing data grav­i­ty (the abil­i­ty of a large body of data to attract appli­ca­tions and ser­vices); con­cerns about main­tain­ing cyber­se­cu­ri­ty and reg­u­la­to­ry com­pli­ance; and unpre­dictable costs.

What might be a bet­ter alter­na­tive to the cloud-first pol­i­cy, par­tic­u­lar­ly con­sid­er­ing the accel­er­a­tion of dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion pro­grammes in the pub­lic sec­tor?

Har­ris observes that the busi­ness world is shift­ing from a cloud-first to a “cloud-every­where” mod­el and argues that the pub­lic sec­tor should fol­low its lead. It also means acknowl­edg­ing that not every­thing is suit­able for pub­lic clouds and that many of the ben­e­fits of a cloud oper­at­ing mod­el can be realised in pri­vate data cen­tres. This approach can “improve effi­cien­cy, reduce ener­gy con­sump­tion and opti­mise costs because you pay only for what you use”. 

Har­ris con­tin­ues: “The next decade will be focused on using data every­where across the entire organ­i­sa­tion. The pub­lic sec­tor should look to adopt edge-to-cloud plat­forms that enable them to con­nect, pro­tect and analyse all their data and act on that infor­ma­tion. This is a strate­gic imper­a­tive for every organ­i­sa­tion, so that it can unlock the full poten­tial of its data.”