Cloud Migration for Local Government

In 2013, the UK Government announced their Cloud First policy. As its name suggests, this new guidance required public sector organisations to consider cloud services ahead of more traditional IT solutions. Since then, adoption of cloud infrastructure and services across local government has grown steadily, but in comparison to other sectors progress remains relatively slow. When we consider that the average council provides up to 700 services, the scale and complexity of the task at hand becomes clear.

The Local Government Act 2000 states that councils hold responsibility for the economic, social, and environmental ’wellbeing’ of their area. They have a legal obligation to provide these services to citizens, alongside a moral duty of care. The need to utilise tax payer funds efficiently creates a high stakes environment to get any cloud migration project right. With almost all organisations consuming IaaS, PaaS, SaaS - or something else as-as- Service - most councils will be utilising services from at least one of the major public cloud providers already. Taking the next steps on the journey needs careful consideration.

Over the last few years, digital transformation programmes have been accelerated in order for public sector organisations to respond to macro factors, including the COVID-19 pandemic. The shift towards services being offered online and the demand from the public to consume them digitally has fuelled this. The average smartphone user has 80 apps on their phone and uses at least 30 of those a month to manage all aspects of their lives, including local government services.

Councils have also needed to adopt cloud services and infrastructure in order to facilitate a remote workforce. They have been required to modernise their infrastructure and applications to deliver improved digital experiences for both employees and users, all whilst ensuring data privacy and continuity of services.

A successful migration will offer greater agility, security, and scalability for service delivery as well as the opportunity to align costs with organisational requirements, at a time when budgetary constraints are being felt. It is worth remembering that cloud adoption isn’t suitable for every workload and no organisation should look to move all their infrastructure to the cloud. There is likely to be some legacy IT that just won’t function successfully in that environment. This needs to be factored into any transformation project.

As attractive as cloud migration sounds, the biggest hurdle facing IT teams is identifying the first step to take. Migrating to the cloud can raise challenges around cost, risk, business continuity, visibility of data, and a short supply of the necessary skills to manage the increased complexity of cloud networking and security. Migrating applications to cloud infrastructure delivers better scalability and optimised performance. However, achieving this can be challenging due to limited visibility of the organisation’s infrastructure and the fact that each IaaS platform has proprietary controls for networking and security.

In this ebook we explore 5 key cloud migration considerations for councils, helping you plan how to overcome concerns around cost, risk, and security to provide a service delivery experience that is focused on user outcomes.