Powered by modern technology and embracing innovations to accelerate digital transformation so the entire organisation – front, middle, and back – is aligned to shift points of interaction to reflect citizen’s needs and preferences. Richard Franck and Cormac Deady of our Infrastructure and Government team explore below.
Making public services digital
The Government’s ambition for the digitisation of public services is clear, with multiple publications in 2022 outlining just that through targeted strategy and vision papers.
The societal and economic benefits of this are also significant, with Ibec’s assessment that just a 10 per cent surge in cloud adoption within Ireland’s public sector could generate an annual economic benefit of €473 million.
Many public sector organisations are already realising the value of cloud-based infrastructure and solutions today, but with ongoing efforts to make it easier for public sector bodies in Ireland to procure cloud services, such as the OGP’s infrastructure as a service (IaaS) framework, the rate of adoption and value realisation is likely to skyrocket over the coming years.
Over the next few years, modern technologies underpinned by Cloud will increasingly be woven into the fabric of Government and Public Services.
In line with this adoption trend, it is also becoming more prevalent that a multi-cloud deployment approach can leverage the benefits of multiple service providers to provide the flexibility needed to run workloads on any cloud depending on an organisation’s specific needs.
This ensures that organisations can consistently migrate, modernise, and secure applications to leverage the best features of their underlying platform, wherever they are deployed.
However, while a multi-cloud approach unlocks new benefits, it also creates new challenges. Understanding and managing the risks associated with your infrastructure and the data being distributed across multiple cloud providers is critical to success.
Critical success factors
Without a robust overarching plan to architect and manage a multi-cloud environment, one of the most-exciting advances in cloud computing can become just a resource-draining IT initiative that fails to deliver on its promise. Here are some important early considerations that can help underpin your success in a multi-cloud model.
- Comprehensive understanding of multi-cloud architecture: It is essential to align IT service management with your multi-cloud operating model and incorporate the right set of tools and technologies to support workload placement across diverse platforms and services.
- Establishing resilience: In today’s fast-changing and threat-laden environment, a new approach to resilience is indispensable – one that helps ensure your ability to ‘bounce back’ quickly from disruptions and maintain application availability. New functional capabilities and skills to embed resilience throughout solution design is the way forward and it will likely require businesses to give resilience greater priority.
- Leverage modern security practices: Security threats continue to soar in frequency, impact, and cost to the organisation. A modern multi-cloud security model features a common access-control model across platforms, applications and data governance. This enables the automation of key capabilities such as identity and access management, compliance for continuous monitoring, reporting, and testing of capabilities.
- Optimise total cost estimates: Amid different pricing models and various mechanisms to control costs among diverse cloud service providers, balancing the value of workloads with associated cloud costs is essential. An understanding of the total cost of hosting an application is a key performance indicator to monitor in order to maintain financial control as the pace of change accelerates.
Get in touch
To take advantages of multi-cloud computing in the public sector, you must first have the correct infrastructure in place. If you are planning or reviewing your digital experiences, we can help. Contact Richard Franck or Cormac Deady of our Infrastructure and Government team for an initial conversation.
We look forward to hearing from you.
Richard Franck
Cloud and Digital Director
KPMG in Ireland
Cormac Deady
Partner, Head of Government & Public Sector
KPMG in Ireland
