The UK public sector has experienced severe economic hardship following the pandemic, with huge pressure to increase staff to help alleviate a cost of living crisis, whilst also having to cope with higher inflation. Budgets are being squeezed at all levels, regardless of service demands. It is inevitable that something has to give. So finding better ways of working has been a priority for public sector organisations in recent years. The problem is that while IT leaders may recognise the need for change, implementing it in practice can be complex and challenging.
Soft skills, business processes and technological performance drive digital transformation. These are critical. As KPMG reveals in a recent report, “the key to safely accelerating technology adoption lies in filling skills gaps, ensuring the government workforce is digitally literate, keeping up with fast-moving technology trends and recruiting top tech talent to make digital transformation plans a reality. If a workforce struggles with digital literacy and lacks leadership, it is difficult for government organizations to safely turn to technology.”
From a technology transformation perspective, the UK public sector has been slow to adopt cloud computing on a large scale and current estimates indicate that approximately 70% of public sector bodies still use three-tier legacy systems in their own data centres as their primary IT platform. IT leaders will understand the need to modernise IT, address legacy systems and simplify the technology stack. However, the complexity and costs of the technology can be inhibiting factors.
As Flexera’s State of the Cloud 2024 report reveals, there are multiple challenges when it comes to cloud adoption, including security, governance, and SaaS license management. Interestingly, managing multi-cloud environments is also listed as a key challenge, something that will resonate with public sector organizations. Many will have already considered or deployed some workloads in the public cloud, for example, but this too has its challenges. According to the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Index (ECI) report, 85% of global public and private sector customers surveyed said public cloud costs were higher than expected and this was becoming a concern.
Senior Cloud Economist at Nutanix.
Automation can reduce complexity and costs
Another factor is time. Digital transformations can be long projects given the scale of legacy IT in the public sector. Unraveling and redesigning processes to adapt to new technologies can be complicated and resource-consuming. A client once told us that after a year of working on their refactoring effort, the organization had only two applications in the cloud. They had spent over $1.1 million refactoring these first few applications, and estimated that another 200 more would need to be refactored and moved.
It’s not an unusual story. Most IT leaders will recognise the challenge. This is where automation can play a major role. Automation removes tedious and time-consuming administrative tasks and enables IT teams to transform people and processes to be more digitally focused. But this is only possible if you have a system in place to help manage workloads across multiple cloud environments.
Most Infrastructure as a Service (IAAS) cloud offerings are purchased in predefined “T-shirt sizes,” each with its own set of resources. This is a cumbersome, manual process that requires IT teams to determine application resource requirements. Unfortunately, sizes often don’t match workload requirements, resulting in the purchase of larger, underutilized instances. More cost, complexity, and time-consuming work for skilled people.
So any IT transformation must find a way to manage workloads across legacy and modern environments, minimizing disruption and optimizing performance. Until now, this IT modernization could only happen if an organization purchased hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) hardware to run in their data center. However, there are now better ways to accomplish much more. For example, with Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2), customers can perform the same modernization across Azure and AWS, and quickly reduce any dependency on legacy data center hardware. This means IT teams can move workloads from 3-tier legacy infrastructures to NC2 in just a few weeks instead of months of planning and application refactoring.
Automation is driving workload management, intelligently allocating workloads to reduce any disruption in a cloud migration project. A typical cloud migration project can take 18 months, however, with this approach it can be reduced to just three months. According to an analysis by Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG), this can also reduce costs by up to 50% or more compared to using the cloud-native approach.
Capacity management and sustainable value
It’s no secret that IT skills are in short supply, and during any transformation where organisations migrate to public clouds, this shortage will be keenly felt as both technical and financial operations capabilities are needed. Through an automated multi-cloud cluster, these same organisations can achieve much more with much less – and that includes people, thereby bridging any skills gaps. This delivers a key outcome for the public sector: repurposing existing IT skillsets rather than having to hire new, costly external skillsets.
Automation hides complexity, reducing the number of new skills and processes that need to be learned, enabling faster cloud adoption and a workforce more willing to embrace change. With extensive automation and a consistent approach to management via the UI, command line interface, or APIs, it’s much simpler to scale deployments on-premises, at service providers, or in the public cloud without scaling IT teams, which also reduces the need to hire new skill sets.
It also enables environmental sustainability by reducing energy consumption. To find the best of both worlds, whether in managing skills, costs, processes and performance, or simply improving migration time for transformation projects, public organizations must adopt multi-load strategies.
With portable licensing, customers choose where to run their workloads, which can be easily moved to any cloud or physical public cloud service offered by a service provider or to an organization’s own data center. While this reduces the risk of vendor lock-in, it also enables workloads to be hosted in a way that complies with current local data laws and allows organizations to quickly adapt to future changes.
The bottom line is that not all clouds are created equal. Organizations must be able to migrate workloads that optimize their performance and value. Public money is valuable, so using automation and hybrid cloud technologies to enable efficient change makes a lot of sense.
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