Benefits of Cloud

Increased organisational agility

Challenge

Government must be able to respond quickly to meet unexpected and sometimes unprecedented challenges on behalf of citizens. New services must be established at short notice in response to national emergencies, or existing services scaled up to meet unprecedented demand.

The challenge is: 'How can government quickly deliver secure, modern digital services that are good value for the public purse?'

Benefits

Cloud services increase organisational agility because they:

• focus on services, not systems: the focus has shifted from on-premises systems to cloud services. As a result, new organisations or government services can be established in dramatically shorter time frames by removing the requirement to provision new IT facilities, hardware, network connectivity, and operational teams (a cloud native organisation)
• reduce organisational overheads: cloud services remove the requirement to build, maintain and operate on-premises systems. In doing so, they also reduce the need to source and build full internal operational teams
• commoditise new capabilities: new cloud features and services can quickly be integrated into new government services, or retrospectively implemented to extend the functionality of existing services
• start small, and build: building new services in the cloud enables your organisation to start small, with low cost proof-of-concept projects that demonstrate the viability of a new service or technology before committing significant effort or public money
• scale rapidly: well-architected cloud services can be scaled quickly to meet any level of demand. Organisations who are responsible for critical citizen services can scale elastically in the face of unpredecented demand with minimal planning or long-term investment