How the cloud helps SMEs gain public sector clout

Once upon a time, it was dif­fi­cult for small­er busi­ness­es to win pub­lic sec­tor con­tracts to pro­vide IT ser­vices, par­tic­u­lar­ly for cen­tral gov­ern­ment.

The biggest chal­lenge was that many pro­cure­ment offi­cials believed get­ting vol­ume dis­counts in one trans­ac­tion was the best way to deliv­er val­ue for tax­pay­ers’ mon­ey. This may sound log­i­cal, but once sup­ply is aggre­gat­ing to a high-enough lev­el, there are only a few sup­pli­ers that can come close to sat­is­fy­ing demand.

There have since been some major changes. First­ly, there has been a renewed focus from the gov­ern­ment to work with small and medi­um-sized enter­pris­es (SMEs) with more spe­cial­ist knowl­edge to pro­vide bet­ter val­ue. Sec­ond­ly, the gov­ern­ment intro­duced its G‑Cloud frame­work, an ini­tia­tive aimed at chang­ing the way sup­pli­ers and buy­ers of ICT ser­vices do busi­ness in the pub­lic sec­tor.

About 90 per cent of sup­pli­ers on G‑Cloud are SMEs, with a cumu­la­tive spend of £2 bil­lion since G‑Cloud’s launch in 2012, or two fifths of the total G‑Cloud spend to date.

Simul­ta­ne­ous­ly, the devel­op­ment of cloud com­put­ing has been embraced with­in gov­ern­ment, enabling depart­ments not only to ben­e­fit from prod­ucts avail­able from major com­pa­nies, but also low-cost, niche prod­ucts from cloud-sup­port­ed SMEs that can pro­vide sup­port and solu­tions.

Using the cloud to sell to the public sector

“Unlike the tra­di­tion­al out­sourcers, Ama­zon Web Ser­vices (AWS) and cloud com­put­ing com­pa­nies are cre­at­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties for SMEs through their advanced and trust­ed part­ner net­works,” says Denis Kamin­skiy, co-founder and direc­tor of Arcus Glob­al, which builds cloud-based prod­ucts for the pub­lic sec­tor.

Arcus Glob­al is one of the more than 150 com­pa­nies that have used AWS to help them deliv­er ser­vices, worth more than £1.3 bil­lion, to the gov­ern­ment, with over half of these com­pa­nies cat­e­gorised as SMEs at the time of deliv­ery.

In fact, cloud com­put­ing has been essen­tial for many of these busi­ness­es. Accord­ing to a Pub­lic First sur­vey, 70 per cent of com­pa­nies using AWS to sell to the pub­lic sec­tor said their busi­ness or oper­at­ing mod­el would not be pos­si­ble with­out cloud plat­forms.

“Before cloud tech­nol­o­gy became main­stream, it would be dif­fi­cult to ten­der for larg­er pub­lic sec­tor con­tracts for a vari­ety of rea­sons. With­out the economies of scale avail­able to larg­er firms, and few­er per­son­nel to assist, it becomes a dif­fi­cult task to acquire, set up and main­tain the vari­ety and depth of hard­ware required to sup­port the needs of gov­ern­ment busi­ness,” says Marc Whit­ting­ham, tech­ni­cal direc­tor of Blue Fron­tier.

Accord­ing to Whit­ting­ham, the pub­lic cloud has changed this per­cep­tion, pro­vid­ing a lev­el play­ing field for all busi­ness­es to be able to access a huge vari­ety of resources to cater for just about any require­ment.

“As a result, small­er busi­ness­es are able to pro­pose for larg­er con­tracts as a large por­tion of the under­ly­ing ‘leg work’ has been tak­en care of by the cloud ven­dor. This in turn allows busi­ness­es to focus on adding val­ue to their offer­ing by util­is­ing their cur­rent exper­tise with­out hav­ing to focus on babysit­ting a vast array of phys­i­cal infra­struc­ture,” he says.

How the cloud adds credibility and security

Whit­ting­ham says there are added ben­e­fits for a sup­pli­er being on G‑Cloud and using cloud com­put­ing. G‑Cloud acts as a badge of cred­i­bil­i­ty so when pub­lic sec­tor bod­ies shop around for IT com­pa­nies, small­er firms can ben­e­fit as they may not need to pitch for con­tracts and have been approached by local gov­ern­ment because of their inclu­sion on the frame­work.

Cloud com­put­ing pro­vides a clear sep­a­ra­tion of roles and respon­si­bil­i­ties when it comes to secu­ri­ty, which is an impor­tant part of pub­lic sec­tor pro­cure­ment.

“By fol­low­ing best prac­tice and util­is­ing pre-hard­ened envi­ron­ments, small­er firms can pitch for work where pre­vi­ous­ly they may have been frozen out due to a lack of inter­nal secu­ri­ty knowl­edge or the abil­i­ty to pro­vide resources ded­i­cat­ed to secu­ri­ty and mon­i­tor­ing envi­ron­ments,” says Whit­ting­ham.

A new way of looking at SMEs

Cru­cial­ly, pub­lic sec­tor bod­ies will learn to trust SMEs more as they see results. Ele­na White, busi­ness sys­tems man­ag­er at the Isle of Angle­sey Coun­ty Coun­cil, says using Arcus Global’s cloud-based plan­ning and build­ing con­trol sys­tem has reduced admin­is­tra­tive efforts and enabled her team to share, digest and use data more eas­i­ly. Restric­tions on dai­ly work because of the pan­dem­ic have been a good test of the sys­tem.

“We’ve been work­ing from home for the past 18 weeks and our plat­forms have been work­ing per­fect­ly, show­ing our employ­ees they can car­ry on as nor­mal with­out being in the office. It just goes to show what a dif­fer­ence being cloud based makes,” White con­cludes.