Smart Public Sector Services Are Adopting the Cloud

Posted by Stuart Spindlow on November 25th, 2016

Under the excuse of cost cutting, every IT expert is advising you to store your data anywhere but certainly not on your local office and local server. As far as the public sector is concerned, many companies are creating their own cloud solutions by asking other agencies to host the former network services, within the latter’s department or local authority, under the budgetary pressure.

The Staffordshire County Council is a fine example of this. The agency has been able to save as much as £1 million per year by allowing a third-party agency to build a network which connects all the district councils and boroughs, along with South Staffs health authority, under the county. 200 council partners and 400 schools, a total of 50,000 devices, were able to connect to the council using this ambitious and new network sharing model. This also allowed the amalgamation of 18 different physical offices into one big HQ at the centre of Stafford.

As far as the participating schools and boroughs are concerned, this is a great step towards cloud computing as the complete IT infrastructure is consolidated in one remote location. This led to a decreased running cost while giving the users more expensive and improved IT infrastructure for the users. However, in real world, could computing means outsourcing the information processing to a third-party and cloud computing in public sector is using a third-party data centre in public sector data processing.

A leading firm has published data which shows that the G-cloud are set to cut down the expenses by £4 billion by 2020 by consolidating 8000 individual data centres and merging them into 12 G-cloud sites. G-clouds were thought to arrive in 2018 only but they are already here and are making a difference.

There is hardly any doubt that the future IT cost cutting in public sector will heavily depend on public sector network sharing project. The Staffordshire County Council’s step would be considered pioneer in this regard, along with the introduction of G-cloud.

Public sector Network is itself an emerging sector and this is causing the shift in shared IT services among individual public sector departments. SOCITM ( the Society of IT Management ) has published a report which says that the PSN (Public Sector Network) is a virtual and resource shared service and "becoming a potential delivery mechanism for shared data centres, storage facilities, the public sector 'cloud', remote technical expertise, and customer and employee self-service".