This White Paper outlines how far the UK public sector has progressed on the path to cloud adoption and the challenges that it will face along the way. We acknowledge that in this research we do not distinguish between the different segments within the public sector, such as health, education and central and local government. Our intention is to commission further research to help us to better understand the specific issues and differences within these segments.
The UK government’s launch of the innovative G-Cloud procurement framework and use of cloud services and other initiatives have helped propel the UK to top the table in the 2016 United Nations e-Government rankings. Without access to the wide range of innovative cloud-based services – and providers – underpinned by the easy buying process provided through G-Cloud and the Digital Marketplace, this early progress in cloud adoption would not have been possible. This has been a game-changer for public sector IT which is bringing a wide variety of significant benefits to public sector organisations.
However, the lack of appropriate funding and a shortage of people with the right skills continue to be fundamental challenges that are acting as a significant brake on progress, with organisations finding that their internal skillsets and organisational culture aren’t well suited to dealing with the new complexities brought by multi-sourced, multi-cloud environments. These obstacles must be navigated and addressed as a priority, if the public sector is to progress and make a lasting break with old ways of working.
In our conclusion, we look at some of the key challenges and what CIF is doing to help the public sector to address these, so that industry can best support the safe and confident progress towards a cloud-native delivery model.
