Highlights
- Cloud adoption and growth in Australia is driven by agility and scalability, digital transformation, IT modernisation, and cost optimisation.
- Government departments and agencies providing public services moved to the cloud primarily because of the shift in user expectations toward state-of-the-art digitally led services.
- There are significant security risks associated with cloud adoption. But making the right cloud choice and ensuring that the business use of cloud services has been clearly defined will help mitigate the risks.
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The big question
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The technology sector is at an inflection point where ‘cloud native’ will quickly become the norm. As one of the most mature cloud markets in the world, Australia has been a forerunner and early adopter of cloud services in both public and private sectors. Let’s explore how cloud can help accelerate digital transformation in government organisations/the public sector with our experts Shalini Mathur, Vice President and Business Head for public sector, Enterprise Growth Group, TCS, and Dhinakar Gunasekar, Head, ANZ Public Sector Business, TCS.
Why cloud?
What is the role of the cloud for businesses seeking to digitally transform?
Prior to the previous federal election in Australia, an e-government policy was launched to accelerate and support the digital economy. It was recommended that organisations with insufficient IT infrastructure move to shared or cloud services. Since then, the Commission of Audit has taken this a step further by recommending the adoption of a cloud-first strategy, which has been well adopted by both federal and state government agencies and industry verticals across Australia. The use of cloud services is an important step toward simplifying IT services and eliminating duplicated and fragmented activity across different government agencies.
Cloud benefits
What are the benefits of cloud adoption for Australian public services?
The key drivers for cloud adoption and growth within Australia are agility and scalability, digital transformation, IT modernisation, and cost optimisation. The cloud offers unparalleled agility benefits and enables companies to take an idea to implementation dramatically faster than ever before.
Cloud services, whether public, private, or hybrid, offer mature capabilities with rapidly growing features. The use of the cloud, especially hyper-scalable public clouds such as Google, Amazon Web Services, and Microsoft Azure, provides government agencies with industry-leading technologies that offer efficiency in time and money, in addition to opening up greater possibilities for innovation and improving service delivery for Australians. Private cloud, on the other hand, offers excellent environments for running certain workloads with higher security and/or regulatory requirements, if not all the benefits of a public cloud.
Public versus private sector
How does adoption of the cloud in public services compare to the private sector?
While large enterprises across all industries started adopting cloud largely as a means to achieve cost efficiencies and due to the strong impetus from government with the launch of the cloud-first strategy, for government departments and agencies providing citizenship services, the primary driver has been the shift in user expectations toward state-of-the-art digitally led services. But due to concerns around security and privacy and other factors specific to the public sector, the move had been slow as compared to other industry verticals until 2020.
As the world went into lockdown, governments couldn’t just shut down and had to find a way to continue to provide services by allowing their employees to work remotely and services to be available digitally, which opened doors for cloud adoption at a rapid pace.
The key drivers for cloud adoption and growth within Australia are agility and scalability, digital transformation, IT modernisation, and cost optimisation. The cloud offers unparalleled agility benefits and enables companies to take an idea to implementation dramatically faster than ever before.
Looking ahead
What does the future hold for the cloud in Australia?
While the shift toward the cloud has been gradual over the past decade, the global pandemic has hugely accelerated this shift, as it became an essential tool for businesses to thrive while teams were displaced and working remotely.
According to research by Gartner, the Australian infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) public cloud services market grew by 40.4% in 2020 alone and now generates a total of $1.4 billion in revenue, up 38% from the previous year’s spend of $988 million. It is on track to exceed $3 billion by 2025, according to an Australian hyperscale cloud market study by Telsyte.
Key challenges
What are the key challenges for cloud adoption for the C-suite?
Although cloud technologies offer scalable, adaptable, and agile benefits along with immediate cost savings, there can also be significant security risks associated with their adoption. While cloud services can deliver a wide and powerful range of capabilities as their potential users are exceptionally broad, it is essential for any organisation to develop a framework to accompany their use.
Identifying and implementing a business decision framework and best practise model will help ensure standardised use across a company. Ensuring that users have a thorough understanding of how and why to use cloud services and are trained to use new platforms will help to mitigate against non-malicious use and reduce the risk associated with malicious attacks.
Making sure that the business use of cloud computing services has been clearly defined will also help to mitigate associated risks by making the right cloud choice. In addition to helping identify legacy infrastructures and making decisions around removing them, this approach will also help an organisation get the most out of such services and open up possibilities to reimagine businesses for the modern-day way of working, customer and client needs and expectations, and regulatory compliance. This will become increasingly important, as research from IDC finds that board members are playing a growing role in the decision-making process for public cloud adoption by integrating cloud strategy into broader business strategies to ensure that organisations realise the promised benefits of cloud.
