Cloud is more than just cost savings for Govt

Smart government leaders know that driving change in their world often takes a different approach than in the commercial enterprise.A government executive’s mandate for a critical technical standard can become an effective force to drive broader transformation.

It must be this insight that has led the Central Government of India to make the bold decision to migrate critical information infrastructure on the cloud. Done right, the benefit can be the seemingly contradictory outcome of systems that cost less while also being more robust and enabling rapid integration and evolution.

The department of information technology in India has plans to set up a national cloud based network that connects all state data centers which would make that the backbone of national e-governance plan, which when completed would deliver many governments to citizens and government business services via the internet. The move to the cloud is driven by many powerful forces. In effect, each of the 28 states and 7 union territories will now have a private cloud of their own.

Although India has woken up to this just recently, other governments have taken a lead. The US government was one of the first governments in the world to come out with a federal cloud strategy, which was invoked by CIO of the US Vivek Kundra in 2010-11. The Obama government has allocated $20 bn of the Federal Government’s IT budget to migrate existing infrastructure on the cloud. In India, state data centers have been built at a cost of `4-5 crore each, are operational in about 16 states, with the rest lagging behind. UP, Punjab, Assam, Mizoram, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh are laggards, even as all states in the South have fully functional data centers, provisioning many public services online. The move will save taxpayer’s money and time, as IT resources like servers and storage will be shared amongst departments, and also provide elasticity and on demand services.

Foundation for Greater Innovation

Cost reduction is a compelling reason to consider moving to a cloud computing model, but other important benefits are significant and must not be ignored. Cloud computing has tremendous potential to open the door to better decision-making based on real-time data and lay a strong foundation for greater focus on innovation at every level of government. The cloud computing approach to resource sharing saves money, but interestingly facilitates higher-level integration of disparate systems, making it much simpler to achieve complex mission requirements.

Today, governments are constrained by systems designed using dated architectural models. Paradoxically the procurement model that was designed to save money and drive effective implementation of individual systems has become the enemy of systems with a more modern design, where core compute, network and storage infrastructure is shared. Harnessing the scale, flexibility, and computing power of cloud computing will enable state agencies to rapidly access and analyze large volumes of data, and quickly implement new analytics.

Insights from this big data will enable breakthrough abilities in areas such as identifying waste, fraud, and abuse in social services programs, conducting more comprehensive healthcare outcomes research, running military simulations, constructing global climate models, or even predicting and managing real-time traffic patterns. The transformational potential of cloud computing extends across several levels. Particularly, at the state and local levels, hundreds of agencies with similar missions are constantly re-inventing the wheel using increasingly stretched taxpayer money, and there is little of the information sharing that would help drive quality of services and encourage innovation. The cloud model helps do away with upfront costs. 

The key advantage is the elimination of the need to procure, monitor, and maintain IT resources. This too is the responsibility of the service provider under the delivery model. Apart from reducing the workload, this reduces the need for IT staff and allows the government or agencies to focus on their core areas of work. Integration can take this benefit even further. There are countless opportunities to improve services through properly integrated information that provides valuable insights to both government employees and the citizens they serve. Frustrations quickly arise when lack of information or bad information leads to long waits and confusion in such activities as registering students, identifying and signing up for social services or requesting permits.

Imagine integrating disparate systems and presenting relevant information that matters in an online portal that enables self-service. Citizens and taxpayers would find it easier to interact with their government and government workers can use the insights to provide better services to their customers. This is a critical moment. It’s time to take a hard look not only at obstacles in the way of getting government tasks done as well as possible, but also at the risk that a job won’t get done at all. An increasing integration of cloud computing into federal, state, and local IT can begin to change the psychology of the mission/IT ecosystem, creating the expectation that IT is the key to making things easier, the critical enabler of agility, and not an impediment to change. A movement toward cloud computing begins to build in a continuing demand for more smoothly functioning, integrated systems. It creates higher standards, greater connectivity, greater transparency.