The UK public sector has experienced severe economic headwinds post-pandemic, with huge pressure to increase staff to help alleviate a cost-of-living crisis, while having to cope with higher inflation. Budgets are being squeezed at all levels regardless of service demands. Something inevitably has to give. So, finding better ways to work has been top of the agenda for public sector organizations in recent years. The problem is that while IT leaders may recognize 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 tech adoption lies in filling skill gaps, ensuring government workforces are digitally literate, by keeping up to date with fast moving technology trends and hiring the best talent from the tech sector to bring digital transformation plans to life. If a workforce struggles with digital literacy and lacks leadership, it’s hard for government organizations to safely lean into technology.”

From a tech transformation standpoint, the UK public sector has been slow to adopt the cloud computing at scale and current estimates are that approximately 70% of public sector bodies still utilize legacy 3-tier systems in their own datacenters, as their primary IT platform. IT leaders will understand the need to modernize IT, to address legacy systems and simplify the technology stack. However, tech complexity and costs 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 also features as a key challenge, something which will resonate with public sector organizations. Many will have already considered or implanted some workloads in the public cloud, for example but this too has its challenges. According to the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Index (ECI) report, 85% of global public and private sector customers surveyed stated that public cloud costs were higher than expected and this was becoming a concern.

Automation can reduce complexity and costs

Another factor is time. Digital transformations can be lengthy projects given the scale of legacy IT in the public sector estate. Unravelling and reshaping processes to new technologies can be tricky and suck-in resources. One customer once told us that after a year of working on its refactoring effort, the organization only had two applications in the cloud. It had spent over $1.1M on refactoring these first applications, with an estimated 200 more to refactor and move.

It’s not an unusual story. Most IT leaders will recognize the challenge. This is where automation can have a significant role to play. Automation eliminates the tedious and time-consuming administrative tasks and enables IT teams to transform people and processes to become more digitally focused. But this is only if you have a system in place to help 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 app resource requirements. Unfortunately, the sizes don’t often match workload requirements, resulting in the procurement of larger underutilised instances. More costs, complexity and time-consuming work for skilled people.

So, any IT transformation has to find a way to manage workloads across legacy and modern environments, minimizing disruption and optimizing performance. Up to now, this IT modernization could only happen if an organization purchased hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) hardware to run in its datacenter. However, there are now better ways to achieve so much more. For example, with Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2), customers can perform the same modernization in Azure and AWS, and quickly decrease any reliance on legacy datacenter hardware. This means 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 is driving the management of workloads, intelligently assigning workloads to reduce any cloud migration project pinch. A typical cloud migration project can take 18 months, however, with this approach it can be reduced to just three months. According to an Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) analysis, this can also lower costs by up to 50% or more compared to using the cloud-native approach.

Managing skills and sustainable value

It’s no secret IT skills are in short supply and during any transformation where organisations are migrating to public clouds this shortage will be deeply felt, as both technical and FinOps capabilities are needed. Through a multicloud, automated cluster, these same organisations can achieve so much more with so much less, and that includes people, therefore covering any skills gaps. This delivers a key outcome for the Public Sector – re-using existing skillsets in IT rather than having to hire external and expensive new skill sets. 

Automation hides complexity, reducing the amount of new skills and processes that are required to be learned, enabling faster adoption of cloud and staff who are more willing to embrace change. With extensive automation and a consistent approach to management via the UI, CLI or APIs, it is much simpler to scale deployments on-premises, in service providers or the public cloud without scaling IT teams – which also reduces the need to hire in new skillsets.

It also enables environmental sustainability by lowering energy consumption. Finding the best of all worlds, whether that’s managing skills, costs, processes and performance, or just improving migration time for transformation projects, public organizations need to embrace multiload strategies.

With portable licenses, 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 into an organization's own datacenter. While this reduces the risk of vendor lock-in, it also allows workloads to be hosted in a way that complies with current data locality laws and enables organizations to adapt quickly to future changes.

The bottom line is that not all clouds are 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.

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