While businesses often are the catalysts for driving cloud growth, government organizations are picking up steam in this area and are helping to drive the growth of the cloud even further. A recent market research report by Technavio predicted a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of over 13% over the next four years for the government portion of the global cloud computing market.
The report found that the biggest reasons for this growth were that government organizations were in need of more cross-functional organization and higher internet speeds due to the increasingly larger and more complex requirements for the IT services they provide.
Breaking down the silos is critical in an enterprise IT strategy, and there are ways to get different IT and business groups on the same team.
Source: John Connolly for InformationWeek
As government organizations and services have grown, so has the organizational complexity for their IT departments and services. One way of substantially streamlining processes and making it easier for different IT groups to work together is to make use of the advantages the cloud has to offer. Moving much of the complexity to the cloud allows government organizations to improve efficiency in both the organizational and technical aspects of their IT.
On the organizational side, teams can more quickly and easily work together, and duplication of responsibilities can be reduced or eliminated. Since it is easier for everyone involved to be talking about and using the same system as the basis for their work, teams can more easily see the overall picture and how they can more effectively tackle the IT needs of their organization.
On the technical side, cloud management platforms (CMP) can help streamline things such as security and the deployment of servers and other resources. It can also provide much more consistency to all processes since standards can more easily be set and enforced. For example, the Morpheus CMP is a unified orchestration layer which provides consistency across multi-cloud and hybrid IT by providing a single interface that can be used to provision resources even if an organization uses several different cloud providers for their needs. Instead of worrying about the differences in native toolsets between spinning up services on AWS vs. Azure, for example, teams can simply focus on their application requirements and use the same workflow to spin up the resources they need from any of their cloud providers!‘
Governments deal not only with general issues of big-data integration from multiple sources and in different formats and cost but also with some special challenges. The biggest is collecting data; governments have dif?culty, as the data not only comes from multiple channels (such as social networks, the Web, and crowdsourcing) but from different sources (such as countries, institutions, agencies, and departments).
Source: ResearchGate
As mentioned, gathering data can be a big process for government organizations. They often have to obtain information from many sources and perhaps do quite a bit of research to find what is needed. If this process is slow due to internet speeds available to government employees, this process can be difficult if not impossible to complete in the time needed to have an effective turnaround for the services they provide. Of course, this is not optimal, so government organizations could definitely use faster connectivity in order to get things done more efficiently on the data collection side.
Not only are there issues with gathering data, government organizations are needing to meet the demand for more of their services to be available online. As more government services have been migrated to web and mobile apps, the need for more speedy and higher quality internet service has risen. With all of this movement, there is also the need for more storage to house the additional data needed, which of course needs to be able to be accessed quickly by an organization’s apps ‘ whether they are serving customers or providing internal support.
In both the private and public sector, the concept of data gravity has taken hold and is impacting how these entities architect their cloud applications. Morpheus is currently engaged with one large multi-country customer deployment where satellite-based data sets have gotten so large that the organization can no longer efficiently transport information to the various agencies and researchers who need it. Instead, they are using Morpheus to creating a centralized portal for provisioning application workspaces and link file and object datasets’ essentially bringing the application users closer to the data.
With all of these factors in place, it looks like government organizations indeed are poised to give rise to additional cloud growth in the coming years, which will benefit both governments and people using their services as these services become more streamlined and easier to access!
