The channel and public sector cloud opportunities

Public sector organisations operate in a heavily scrutinised environment, with reliability and value for money the key drivers that push these organisations to constantly seek to improve and streamline their IT assets.

As well as delivery targets for public services, central government has also imposed environmental obligations on the public sector. In July 2008 the UK government became the first to launch an action plan, Greening Government ICT, to address the environmental aspects of IT. This plan laid out steps for central government departments to reduce their carbon footprint. Some public sector bodies are also committing to cuts in carbon emissions in excess of mandatory requirements, such as the Nottingham declaration.

Public sector business processes require availability, reliability and also sustainability as authorities look to implement environmental savings in line with civil service and European regulations. More than this, requirements for regular easy and effective testing are needed. Many organisations are also considering facilitating a flexible working environment that will embrace staff working remotely so that essential services can meet assigned targets even when staff cannot physically access the office.

These techniques enable changes in IT agility to realise efficiency and cost and carbon savings by employing the most efficient methods of running essential business operations.

Specifically organisations can realise benefits of increased storage capacity as servers are virtualised to be hosted by scaleable datacentres. Allied to this is the benefit of greater flexibility and mobility as services are provisioned as needed. High levels of automation also reduce the time required spent managing, testing and implementing applications and storage resources.

For all these reasons the public sector is looking at cloud computing, particularly organisations that are interested in building their own private clouds, but too often approaches are fragmented and lack cohesion. To make the transition successful, you need to do your homework and perform the right planning. It is important to go in with your eyes open as current technologies may have grown organically and be quite complex.

Keith Clark, head of ICT at the Royal Borough of Windsor states the case and the potential cost benefits: “To make the transition successful you need an experienced and proven partner that can advise and make the project happen. We have reduced our energy bill by 44 percent so far and predicted a saving of around £1.2m on the projects during a five year period.”

Some applications are already being outsourced completely to cloud providers, for example Microsoft Exchange email, SharePoint, and web services are already well established in both the public and private sector. Virtualising IT infrastructure is a good starting point with proven return on investment for server consolidation, lowering support costs with centralised application delivery, extending the life of a PC fleet with desktop virtualisation, and lowering storage costs and return on assets.

The latest virtualisation and cloud enabling solutions like server consolidation, energy efficient technologies, workstations and thin client devices can be implemented to form the basis of a private cloud. Alternatively, trusted partners offer hosted solutions that take the burden of operational management away from the customer and into a datacentre. Experienced partners can then provide public sector organisations greater security and reliability helping meet their service level agreements.

Why will the public sector increasingly embrace cloud computing principles?
•    Low cost scaling allows for new projects to be rapidly catered for without the need to over purchase and keep resources in reserve;
•    Flexible provisioning as needed grants superior business agility;
•    Lower storage costs as cloud hosts have the capacity to offer storage at economy of scale prices;
•    Time saving economies from automatically applied updates, archiving and backup processes; and
•    Services are accessible from anywhere making remote working practices feasible and easy to manage.

This means that organisations will be able to move their focus from IT operations to IT enablement, facilitating creativity and the planning of new business services.

As Richard Dawson IT services manager for Bracknell Forest Borough Council puts it: “The piecemeal way the IT infrastructure had been built over the years was not adequate enough to offer the level of support that was needed. We needed to transform the structure so it was stable, and standardised from end to end.” Councils no longer want to “spend much of our time cobbling together inadequate in-house software programs to cope with an irregular server set up."

And what does this mean for consultants? Opportunities, regular revenues from maintenance contracts and the power to become a trusted partner to organisations that will look to you for every aspect of running its IT operations. The possibilities for then expanding on the initial cloud implementation are numerous, depending on the amount of work one is prepared to put into ones datacentre technologies and how flexible one can be with one’s own partners in driving new offerings.

The latest virtualisation technologies offer the public sector flexibility and efficiencies that will prove vital to ongoing success. By realising the financial and environmental benefits of virtual technologies, organisations can add value to local communities and citizens.

Top tips for cloud consultants:
•    Ensure full understanding of what the current business problem is before offering a solution.
•    Ensure the organisation understands the level of operational administration that will be needed of implementation solutions to be managed in-house.
•    Understand that whilst public sector organisations run under similar constraints and regulations, the levels of service and required IT services can vary greatly.