Cloud transformation in the public sector: 5 success stories
Cloud migration in the public sector involves unique challenges. Learn about 5 organisations that got it right.
The last few years have seen a remarkable upsurge in cloud adoption and digital transformation policies. Whether you're selling shoes online or administering life-saving medical care; whether you're in charge of a factory or a farm – the cloud is here to stay.
Each sector has its own challenges – and in the case of the public sector, there are two biggies. The first is the complexity of the systems, which are often patchworks of legacy software and hardware that don't always excel at internal communication. The second is that public sector organisations deal with swathes of confidential information that can't be put at risk.
Nevertheless, the public sector has seen some impressive transformations over the last decade. In this article, we celebrate five of them.
1. NHS England
For 75 years, NHS England has provided healthcare services free at the point of use (with some exceptions) to UK residents. It's funded by general taxation and overseen by the Department of Health and Social Care.
NHS England has a spotty history with technology, with several failed IT projects since the 1980s and a network of electronic systems that has been criticised for not being successfully joined up. On the other hand, it provides a huge amount of healthcare information to the public online. It's also invested considerable time and money in moving to the cloud.
NHS England's IT infrastructure centralises data in its Spine service. This enables services such as electronic prescriptions, summary care records, e-referrals and the Child Protection Information Sharing scheme.
It holds a lot of data, sending up to 47 million messages every day between 28,000 NHS IT systems. So it's no mean feat that, as of January 2024, Spine is now fully cloud-based. All data centres that previously hosted the Spine system have now been decommissioned.
This move is in line with NHS England's
principle that "digital services should move to the public cloud unless there is a clear reason not to do so".
2. Children's Brain Tumor Network
US President Joe Biden has launched his
Cancer Moonshot, which aims to "reduce the death rate from cancer by at least 50% over the next 25 years, and improve the experience of people and their families living with and surviving cancer – and, by doing this and more, end cancer as we know it today".
As part of this initiative, Amazon Web Services (AWS) is working with the Children's Brain Tumor Network (CBTN), a global
organisation that is "dedicated to driving innovative discovery, pioneering new treatments and accelerating open science to improve health for all children and young adults diagnosed with a brain tumor".
CBTN has data-sharing agreements with 32 healthcare institutions worldwide. This allows anonymised clinical data on brain and spinal cord tumours to be freely accessed by scientists – an open science model that is only possible because of AWS's cloud transformation.
AWS is also working with the Pediatric Brain Tumor Atlas, the CAVATICA analytics platform, and the Gabriella Miller Kids' First Data Resource Center.
In the words of AWS's Ken Harris: "[We're] proud to continue our work with the CBTN with the shared goal of deploying technology to improve outcomes for children and young adults with brain cancer."
3. ARIA S.p.A
In 2023, cloud computing firm VMware handed out awards to the "business heroes and industry innovators" among their customers. That year's Customer Experiences Hero was ARIA: the company responsible for the digital transformation of public government in Lombardy, northern Italy.
ARIA won the award for having "quickly and consistently migrated critical workloads to the cloud from over 44 local data centres of regional hospitals". In the process, they improved sustainability, security, ROI and efficiency.
This award demonstrates a truth about cloud technology that sometimes gets lost in the technical fog. Cloud migration isn't just about improving IT performance for its own sake. It's about making customer experiences better – something that's especially, though not uniquely, important in the healthcare sector.
4. The City of Edmonton, Canada
Edmonton is the capital city of the Canadian province of Alberta. It's known as the "Gateway to the North". Recently, it's also been a gateway to cloud transformation.
With a population of one million, the city was given the gong for Cloud Infrastructure Innovator at the 2023 VMware Explore conference.
It took, VMware said, "a smarter, forward-looking and more cost-effective path to public cloud". In practice, this means several things.
First, employees can now work from any location, at any time. In the post-pandemic age of hybrid working, this flexibility is seen by many public sector organisations as essential for both productivity and staff well-being.
Secondly, Edmonton's cloud infrastructure is public-facing. It allows residents to access important public services with minimal security risks.
These achievements will, VMware says, "unlock greater developer productivity and innovation". Three cheers for the cloud!
5. Forestry and Land Scotland
Forestry and Land Scotland is the organisation responsible for Scotland's national forest estate: around 650,000 hectares spread across the country. It's an executive agency of the Scottish government, meaning it's part of government but operates at an arm's length.
Nick Mahlitz, Senior Digital Infrastructure Manager, has been overseeing a change in direction as 25 years' worth of data and software is shifted to a public cloud environment.
Mahlitz says: "We're taking an entire data centre, you know, 300 applications, 30 terabytes of data, from on-premise to a public cloud… It's very much a trailblazing kind of use case for the public sector because, in the public sector, nobody's taking a risk."
Public sector organisations can indeed be risk-averse when it comes to cloud transformation – not least because of the complexity of the systems involved and the mammoth amounts of data at stake. But we hope this article has shown you that there are trailblazers across the world putting the public sector squarely in the 21st century.
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public sector cloud migration partner?
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