The UK public sector has faced severe economic headwinds following the pandemic, with huge pressure to hire more staff to ease the cost of living, while facing higher inflation. Budgets are being squeezed at all levels, regardless of demand for services. Inevitably, something has to give. So finding better ways of working has been at the top of the agenda for public sector organisations in recent years. The problem is that while IT leaders recognise the need for change, actually implementing change can be complex and challenging.
People skills, business processes and technology performance drive digital transformation. These are fundamental. As KPMG reveals in a recent report, “the key to safely accelerating technology adoption lies in closing skills gaps, ensuring government employees are digitally literate, staying abreast of rapidly changing technology trends and hiring the best talent from the technology sector to bring digital transformation plans to life. If a workforce struggles with digital literacy and lacks leadership, it is difficult for government organizations to safely lean on technology.”
From a technology transformation perspective, the UK public sector has been slow to adopt cloud computing on a large scale and current estimates are that around 70% of the public sector is still using legacy 3-tier systems in their own data centres, as their primary IT platform. IT leaders will understand the need to modernise IT, to address legacy systems and simplify the technology stack. However, technology complexity and cost 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 managing SaaS licenses. Interestingly, managing multi-cloud environments is also a key challenge, something that will resonate with public sector organizations. For example, many will have already considered or deployed some workloads in the public cloud, but this too comes with its own 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 were becoming a concern.
Senior Cloud Economist at Nutanix.
Automation can reduce complexity and costs
Another factor is time. Digital transformations can be long-term projects, given the scale of legacy IT in the public sector. Unraveling and refactoring processes to new technologies can be difficult and resource-intensive. A customer once told us that after a year of refactoring, their organization had only two applications in the cloud. They had spent more than $1.1 million refactoring these initial applications, with an estimated 200 more to refactor and move.
It’s not an uncommon story. Most IT leaders will recognize the challenge. This is where automation can play a key role. Automation removes tedious and time-consuming administrative tasks and enables IT teams to transform their people and processes to become more digitally focused. But this is only possible if you have a system in place to 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 the resource requirements for applications. Unfortunately, the sizes often do not match workload requirements, resulting in the purchase of larger, underutilized instances. This adds cost, complexity, and time-consuming work for skilled labor.
Any IT transformation must therefore find a way to manage workloads across both legacy and modern environments, minimize disruptions and optimize performance. Until now, this IT modernization could only happen if an organization purchased hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) hardware to run in the datacenter. But now there are better ways to achieve much more. For example, with Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2), customers can perform the same modernization across Azure and AWS and quickly reduce their reliance on legacy datacenter hardware. This means that IT teams can move workloads from 3-tier legacy infrastructures to NC2 in just a few weeks, instead of months of planning and app refactoring.
Automation drives workload management, intelligently assigning workloads to reduce each cloud migration project bottleneck. A typical cloud migration project can take 18 months, but with this approach, it can be reduced to just three months. According to analysis by Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG), it can also reduce costs by 50% or more compared to using the cloud-native approach.
Skills 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 deeply felt as both technical and FinOps capabilities are required. Through a multi-cloud, automated cluster, the same organisations can achieve so much more with so much less, and that includes people, closing any skills gaps. This delivers a key outcome for the public sector: reusing existing skills in IT rather than hiring new skills externally and at great cost.
Automation hides complexity, reducing the amount of new skills and processes that need to be learned, accelerating cloud adoption and making staff more willing to embrace change. With comprehensive automation and a consistent approach to management via UI, CLI, or APIs, it’s much easier to scale deployments on-premises, with service providers, or in the public cloud without scaling IT teams—which also reduces the need to hire new skills.
It also enables environmental sustainability by reducing energy consumption. To find the best of all worlds, whether that is managing skills, costs, processes and performance, or simply improving migration time for transformation projects, public organisations must embrace multiload strategies.
With portable licensing, customers choose where to run their workloads, which can be easily moved to any cloud or bare-metal service offered in the public cloud, by a service provider, or back to an organization’s own data center. While this reduces the risk of vendor lock-in, workloads can also be hosted in a way that complies with current data locality laws and enables organizations to quickly adapt to future changes.
The bottom line is that not all clouds are created equal. Organizations need to be able to migrate workloads that optimize their performance and value. Public money is precious, so using automation and hybrid cloud technologies to enable efficient change makes a lot of sense.
We provide an overview of the best cloud optimization services.
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