Looking skyward: how governments are moving from cloud-first to cloud-smart
Cloud computing offers numerous benefits – but governments must ensure that its use is effective in providing rapid, secure, and stable access to digital services. At the Global Government Digital Summit, digital leaders explained how
Governments are beginning to save serious money by shifting to cloud services – but the benefits of adopting cloud go far beyond cost savings: value also comes from sharp increases in the velocity of technology delivery, in the velocity of the services that sit on top of that technology, and in quality, with governments reporting that customer satisfaction is going up, relative to on-premises infrastructure.
This was one of the key messages to come out of a session on getting cloud right in government at Global Government Forum’s 2024 Digital Summit. Hosted by the Canadian government each autumn, last October’s Summit attracted 58 top digital leaders from 24 nations and international organisations to Ottawa for informal discussions on the challenges they face in common and how to overcome them.
Managing the transition successfully
Governments around the world have developed strategies to make use of cloud computing to host and process government data, making it easier for departments and agencies to access the information they hold and analyse it to provide insight on driving better delivery.
But some administrations are now moving from a cloud-first approach to a cloud-smart policy, in order to make sure that its use is effective in providing rapid, secure, and stable access to digital services.
Digital leaders highlighted that not every service or function is suitable for the cloud and public bodies need the skills and resources to manage the transition successfully.
Recognising this, Canada is one of the countries to have embarked on a cloud-smart journey. As Government of Canada CIO Dominic Rochon explained, having moderated its push into the cloud, the country now has an ‘application hosting strategy’ that “focuses on choosing the most suitable hosting models for applications, based on both cost-effectiveness and business value”.
The strategy is built around four key goals, said Rochon: robust governance; competitive procurement; transparent funding models; and consolidation of demand to “reduce the operational burdens on federal institutions and enhance collaboration”. The Treasury Board Secretariat – where Rochon sits – is “responsible for monitoring and reporting” progress against its strategy, he said, while Shared Services Canada “is going to be the gatekeeper and help us responsibly implement this” across government.
Read more: Aiming high with AI: making artificial intelligence ubiquitous across government
Fighting fear with knowledge – and navigating procurement problems
Realising a cloud-adoption strategy includes identifying organisations with low cloud utilisation and finding out what’s behind that – and often, Summit delegates heard, the culprit is fear. This is where establishing a digital consultancy – teams of experienced cloud specialists – can help. Such teams’ remit can include creating guidebooks focused on de-risking cloud deployment, change management protocols, and a standardised way of assessing digital technology investments to aid decision-making.
In addition, as in any cross-government push towards new ways of working, establishing a formal mechanism through which government practitioners – those driving cloud adoption in this case – can share their learnings with public servants who don’t have specialist skills or experience is invaluable.
These kinds of support services can help departments overcome some of the challenges to adopting cloud, which often include their own instinctive resistance to replacing bespoke systems with standardised services. “Everybody wants to customise,” commented Rochon. “But the reluctance is starting to dissipate as people see the benefits of speed, of agility, of avoiding duplication.”
Procurement is another challenge: Shared Services Canada (SSC) is working to create public and private Government of Canada clouds, explained SSC president Scott Jones, giving public bodies an easy route into the cloud and securing economies of scale. He also highlighted the challenges around budgeting for public bodies: while on-premises servers are typically funded out of capital budgets, cloud services draw on operations and maintenance spending. This has various implications, including the need to move digital funds from capital to revenue accounts: “This model is fundamentally shifting our budget allocations, and that’s something we have to tackle,” said Jones.
Moving into the cloud also demands substantial spending on service design, noted Jones, pointing out that many of the benefits of cloud can only be realised by redesigning business processes. “The vision for AI,” Jones said, “is not going to work if we don’t fix what’s been out there 30, 40, 50 years – which is expensive.”
Read more: Canadian minister signals push for cybersecurity and digital credentials
Scaling up, and data protection dilemmas
However, some attendees at the summit highlighted other challenges, including a lack of cloud hyperscalers in their locality – and a requirement for data to stay within their boundaries.
Suggestions on how to tackle these challenges include presenting those dictating that data should be hosted internally with a list of friendly countries with cloud platforms that your country’s footprint could be extended to, and then negotiating with cloud providers to see which could provide internal workload management within the country in question.
In countries with more developed cloud markets, Jones recommended that governments commission more than one provider – ensuring competition between suppliers for new services and contract renewals. This requires digital teams to avoid embedding dependence into their cloud services: “You have to be extremely disciplined in how you develop your cloud apps,” he warned. “If you use the native tools, you’re never moving off ‘insert vendor here’.”
Jones also highlighted the importance of gathering detailed, real-time data on cloud costs – particularly where, as in the case of SSC, a central body must allocate spending to a wide range of public bodies. The risk, explained Rochon, is that where public sector cloud users don’t have full visibility of their costs, they can end up wasting resources: “The analogy we use is that your electricity bills go up if you leave all the lights on in your building when everyone goes away for the weekend.”
Governments’ leverage in the cloud market
Having learned these lessons, governments like Canada are now rapidly ascending into the cloud. Where there are growing volumes, public sector buyers are increasingly influential in cloud provider markets – particularly given the ability of central agencies such as SSC to set standards, provide tools and aggregate demand across government. And that buying power is further increased when central government extends its acquisition vehicles to local and regional administrations.
SSC’s cloud offer is also available to provincial and municipal authorities, Jones explained; and public buyers are beginning to flex their muscles, pushing suppliers for stronger action in key fields such as cybersecurity and accessibility. “Government colleagues are going to be pushing these things before the private sector does,” he said. “I think those are places where we could really leverage this group.”
One of the main messages to come out of the session is that governments shouldn’t underestimate their leverage in the cloud market. They are prime drivers of acceptance and utilisation in the commercial sector: when some new tech or innovation comes along, the world watches and waits for governments to start using it because when they do, they know it is fully vetted and ready for prime time. As one digital leader put it: “It’s up to us to remind them of the fact that they need us more than we need them.”
Six transferable lessons for tech development
Government digital leaders have learnt that some of the key tenets that have led to successful cloud adoption at scale are portable to other disruptive technologies. Such tenets include:
Stable leadership: hiring people who are going to stick around to see initiatives through – not just big names who will be around for a year or two – is key to being able to deliver.
Creating the right culture and mindset: where possible through public bodies whose remit is to develop in-house delivery capabilities.
Facing fear of change within your organisation: reminding people of the changes to have occurred over the last decade and explaining that this new disruptive tech is a natural progression.
Making the business value of what you’re doing clear to senior executives: so that the supervisors and managers pushing change have the backing they need from the top.
Undertaking a business value assessment before entering negotiations with industry partners: civil servants must understand their own requirements and goals in detail, along with the implications of different funding models and charging systems.
Taking care not to complete one project and move straight onto the next without pausing to recognise the hard work that has taken place: disruptive technologies will come along every five or 10 years and stopping to recognise people for the work they’ve done will set the stage for the next tranche of change.
The invitation-only Global Government Digital Summit is a private event, providing a safe space at which civil servants with senior digital, data and AI roles in government can discuss and debate the challenges they face in common. GGF produces these reports to share some of their thinking with our readers – checking before publication that participants are content to be quoted.
Our four reports cover the four daytime sessions. This article summarises the second session. The first covered how to make AI ubiquitous across government. The next two reports – on digital credentials and data sharing – will be published in the coming weeks.
Listen to our podcast: Leading Questions Live: Dominic Rochon on making digital transformation happen
About Matt Ross
Matt is Global Government Forum's Contributing Editor, providing direction and support on topics, products and audience interests across GGF’s editorial, events and research operations. He has been a journalist and editor since 1995, beginning in motoring and travel journalism – and combining the two in a 30-month, 30-country 4x4 expedition funded by magazine photo-journalism. Between 2002 and 2008 he was Features Editor of Haymarket news magazine Regeneration & Renewal, covering urban regeneration, economic growth and community development; and from 2008 to 2014 he was the Editor of UK magazine and website Civil Service World, then Editorial Director for Public Sector – both at political publishing house Dods. He has also worked as Director of Communications at think tank the Institute for Government.
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