UK public sector buys into Public Cloud

UK public sector organisations are taking significant steps on the path to digital transformation by embracing public cloud services, findings from a new study from EMC, VCE and VMware today reveal. A study of more than 600 business decision makers across the UK shows that well over three quarters (85 percent) of respondents from the UK public sector are using some form of public cloud services, and just under two-thirds (60 percent) of respondents use some form of public cloud services whether validated by IT or not.

As public sector organisations look to embrace the scale, flexibility and speed of public clouds, the research highlights the main reasons for adoption: over a third (36 percent) cited it was used for back-up and recovery services, closely followed by hosting internal applications (35 percent). This highlights the need for public sector IT departments to have a hybrid cloud strategy in place that gives easy access to cloud services, but in a controlled, compliant manner.

With continued pressure to increase the use of ICT across UK public sector organisations and deliver efficiencies, this adoption of public cloud services is being led predominantly by affordability (more than a third of respondents [34 percent] cited this as the main reason for choosing to buy-in external cloud services within their department), followed by ease of use (23 percent), while 20 percent stated they used public cloud because it was the right solution for the application they were using.

“The findings from this research are very positive for the public sector. Line of businesses are using public cloud services to drive efficiencies across the organisation – both for employees to access data inside the organisation, and to speed the delivery of citizen-focused services, for example passport applications, that fluctuate at times throughout the year,” comments Andy Tait, Head of Public Sector Strategy, VMware.

“In order for the UK public sector to drive efficiencies in a secure, flexible, agile and compliant manner, business users need to look at embracing a hybrid cloud strategy that can provide portability of workloads, one set of management tools and deliver services such as disaster recovery and built in security – without the cost of having to investing in unnecessary resources and tools,” concludes Tait.