Government agencies need the cloud

Peter Dinham
Thursday, 23 February 2012 13:51

Funding, resource and skill constraints are holding back government agencies in the Asia Pacific region from developing sustainable ICT capabilities, according to one leading analyst firm, although it suggests that mature, enterprise-grade cloud services provide a potential solution to the dilemma faced by the agencies.

In a recent report, Dr Steve Hodgkinson, research director for Ovum's Asia-Pacific IT research, says that cloud services offer an edge in an 'unsustainable game of ICT snakes and ladders' being played by many government agencies.

According to Hodgkinson, Ovum's assessment of the pattern of audit reports in recent years is that many government agencies are stuck in that game of ICT snakes and ladders, with governments' demands for ICT-enabled policy and service innovation outstripping their capacity to fund the ICT capabilities of agencies.

'Mature, enterprise-grade cloud services provide a solution to this dilemma. They deliver a cloud innovation edge to agencies, enabling them to benefit from access to sustainable world-class ICT capabilities at a lower cost than would otherwise be possible.'

Hodgkinson says the benefits of the cloud model revolve primarily around a range of attributes, which distinguish cloud providers from the 'internal ICT capabilities of all but the very largest and most capable agencies.' He suggests this can be thought of as the 'cloud innovation edge,' with the key attributes of 'scale, focus, multi-tenancy, resilience, and iterative evolution, the use of SOA, social and mobile technologies, Internet-age security, self-service, usage-based charging, and vendor ecosystems.'

Agency ICT departments aspire to many of these attributes, Hodgkinson  says, but makes the point that they can seldom achieve or sustain all of them due to resource and skill constraints and the challenges of supporting diverse and fragmented legacy infrastructure and applications. 'Cloud service providers have the advantage of being able to define a catalogue of services that are optimised to run in a standardised infrastructure to world-class best-practice levels of performance.'

Ovum says that the cloud innovation edge is an important strategic perspective on the long-term benefits of the cloud computing model versus in-house ICT for selected applications and infrastructure services, and in the medium term expects that the maturity and sophistication of the leading cloud providers will increase rapidly and sustainably. 'Unfortunately, the outlook for the maturity and sophistication of the in-house ICT capabilities of most agencies is a continuation of snakes and ladders development. Increasing fiscal austerity further compounds the likelihood that this will be the case,' Hodgkinson adds.

Hodgkinson recommends that agencies:

'¢    Include cloud services in their ICT strategy. A strategic perspective is required to position cloud services as part of a transformation of the agency's approach to sourcing and managing ICT

'¢    Discover the cloud services available from trusted enterprise ICT vendors. Agencies may find that the most expedient way into the cloud is to leverage and evolve with existing trusted vendor relationships and procurement arrangements

'¢    Analyse application and data portfolios to identify cloud services opportunities. One of the advantages of cloud services is that they create both the imperative, and the opportunity, for agencies to focus on information and data rather than technology and software

'¢    Get hands-on experience with cloud services. Agencies should put selected applications and/or infrastructure services to the test and see the reality of cloud services for themselves