Of the 44% of councils who said they did not have a strategy or IT policy for the use of cloud, just one third (15%) say they are exploring or considering a cloud IT policy.
The findings which are based on responses provided by the top 100 councils in the UK, suggest that the majority of councils and their IT teams have yet to get to grips with how cloud can support strategic initiatives such as business transformation, IT cost reduction and service redesign.
The majority (63%) of the top 100 councils say they have two or more on premise data centres and a third (34%) use no external data centres. With regard to cloud use, only 10% of councils have moved to a pure cloud IT model and 93% hold all but a negligible amount of data on premise (defined as 10% or less of total data).
“One of the things from the research that we found most concerning is that over a quarter (27%) of the councils approached for the survey could not provide a breakdown of where their data was currently held. This shows that information management maturity is still relatively low in local government, which needs to be addressed in the move to digital delivery.” Said Andrew Hawkins, Public Sector Director, Eduserv
Jos Creese, Principal Analyst at Eduserv’s Local Government Executive Briefing Programme said:
“While there is little surprise that only a handful of councils are showing digital maturity in their adoption of cloud services, the fact that such a large number have yet to formalise any sort plan for using cloud IT is of great concern.
As cloud use becomes more ubiquitous, local authorities cannot afford not to have plans to ensure that it is used safely and with controls in place to ensure data is managed in a way which reduces risk.
From a strategic perspective, the prevalence of on premise IT shows that the majority of councils are still poorly positioned to exploit digital change in a way which generates both service and financial benefit.
If councils are to go down this path then it will be critical to address the apparent lack of clarity around where data is stored which emerged from our research.”
