Why hybrid cloud is a perfect fit for the public sector

Citizen-focused services with temporal peaks and troughs such as tax self-assessment or the Passport Service are ideal candidates for hybrid cloud, writes Marc Esmiley

Traditional business applications have often been very complicated and expensive to install configure and maintain. SystemsUp are of the opinion that cloud services is a paradigm shift in the provision of IT services. If businesses want to provision a load balancer, a firewall, a few machines, in old money you are talking weeks, if not months and tens of thousands of pounds. You will probably then need a whole team of experts to install, configure, test, run, secure and update them. Now with cloud your entire enterprise is a few mouse clicks and a couple of pounds away from deploying such infrastructure or software as a service.

We know about consumption costs, yes they can cost you a fair bit - but only if you let them. Your solution and services should be designed to minimise costs, otherwise what is the point?

Sure, you will gain speed and agility as well as a whole load of additional services from which to build your IT solution of the future. But this is of no value unless it helps your bottom line. Cost is a primary driver. Ongoing cost, cost of delay, opportunity costs et cetera all feed into the equation.

Due to the size and complexity of IT infrastructure within the public sector especially, it is nearly impossible to just "switch off" services and place them in the cloud. This is where hybrid cloud comes into play, de-risking changes to business applications and services while innovating with technology.

Whether a public or private cloud platform is selected these connected hybrid environments can manage both complex and straightforward workloads. This then allows internal staff to focus on business-centric bespoke applications and tasks within the organisation.

Coming from a public sector background, I have seen the everyday struggle with overstretched internal resources.

The potential for true hybrid in the public sector is massive. Think of citizen-focused applications that have wildly varying demands at different times of the year such as the tax self-assessment tool or the Passport Service. Both are only running at peak for very short periods of time, but need enormous scale of infrastructure to cope with their peak demands. These are perfect applications to be migrated in a hybrid cloud, where applications can be run in-house for most of the year and then moved out to a public cloud where they can be scaled enormously, in order to cope with - and keep things up and running during - that busy period.

The models used to enable consumption of hybrid cloud services can work well for a public sector trying to avoid being stuck with expensive contracts; remember the ‘six thousand pounds a year to run a laptop' which hit the headlines in 2013? Hybrid allows far more flexible models that enable the consumption of desktop as a service, disaster-recovery-as-a-service and infrastructure-as-a-service whenever they are needed - and in an elastic, easily scalable way, based on requirements at that time.

Of course, no discussion around cloud in the public sector can avoid mention of data security. For several years, it put a handbrake on greater cloud take-up due to government fears, and in a post-NSA world, concern among citizens around how and where their data is stored and used has intensified. The vast majority of citizen data cannot leave the UK, so any hybrid cloud service has to ensure its data centres are based here. While I mentioned that appetite for risk has started to increase, this is one thing that's not going to change any time soon.

There will be a number of key challenges for public sector IT over the next 12 months, particularly in an election year when the ability to do more - and better - for less will be firmly on the agenda, and any major IT projects will be closely scrutinised. Hybrid cloud will come into its own to make the most of existing infrastructure investments by opening up the public cloud, enabling the environment to be extended seamlessly and providing a platform to deliver the services citizens are demanding.

We are at the start of a great uptake in cloud services, but to achieve the most benefit, these IT environments need to prepare and transform their applications and environment while migrating and hosting these services in the cloud. We have seen a big uptake in the Public sector with organisations using familiar and therefore similar technologies to their "on-premise" environment, selecting cloud Providers that offer these technologies to reduce cost of delay and risk.

We have used some specific methodologies to assist public sector bodies in their cloud journey and the outcome is normally quite similar. The focus on quick wins has often been commoditising services such as backup, email, archive storage, mobile device management and disaster recovery. These services are normally highlighted due to the amount of time involved in maintenance and the costs involved. We have successfully completed migrations for both large and small public sector clients which have then been rewarded with increased service from a hybrid cloud environment along with up to 70 per cent cost reduction for IT services. In fact, with one customer we were able to achieve an over 90 per cent reduction in cost worth hundreds of thousands of pounds.

Wikipedia states that: "Hybrid cloud is a composition of two or more clouds (private, community or public) that remain distinct entities but are bound together, offering the benefits of multiple deployment models". We think that the next two years will change how public sector IT bodies host and manage their environments. This change will be continue the abstraction and commoditisation which virtualisation first brought to market a decade ago, with containerisation and software as a service at the cutting edge. Even greater benefits are still to be had!

Marc Esmiley is senior cloud solutions architect at SystemsUp