Governments need resilient multi-cloud roadmap for digital services

Cloud services have become a major imperative for governments as it enables them to scale the delivery of more efficient, transparent, and secure digital services, leading to better citizen engagement.    

In Southeast Asia, the governments of Singapore, The Philippines and Malaysia similarly adopted a cloud-first policy to reduce costs and improve public service delivery. The implementation of cloud infrastructure enables them to leverage artificial intelligence (AI) and support whole-of-government modernisation. 

In addition to benefits like cost reduction and higher efficiency, governments around the world are increasingly adopting cloud as it allows them to control and protect their data, and provides the agility they require to keep up with rapid technological changes. 

Sovereign cloud is the flavour 

While governments are enthusiastic about the cloud, they are not looking at any commercial cloud service that is available.  

With an increased focus on the need for trust, governments are looking for cloud environments and services that comply with the country’s specific data residency, security and compliance requirements.  

These concerns are segueing governments towards sovereign cloud environments where the government retains autonomy to control digital assets, data, and operations.  

According to the Futurum Group, sovereign clouds are emerging as a critical element of the global cloud ecosystem, driven by strict data protection regulations, privacy concerns, and government mandates. 

Data supports this assertion. According ​​to a report​​​​ by research agency IDC last year, ​​governments in the Asia Pacific region are increasingly moving towards sovereign cloud services with 17 per cent already utilising them and a third planning to do so within two years. 

To subscribe to the GovInsider bulletin, click here. 

Standardising and optimising e-government services

Leveraging on a common cloud platform can help government agencies to standardise and improve digital services across the whole of government. An open hybrid cloud approach enables organisations to deploy any application and workload from their own data centres to sovereign clouds, achieving control and consistency across different cloud environments. 

Uruguay’s Agency for Electronic Government and Information Knowledge Society (AGESIC) started its transformation journey by moving from on-premises data centres to a private cloud. 

By optimising its​​ existing infrastructure based on Red Hat OpenShift for AI, AGESIC was able to extend, scale and standardise the use of AI across Uruguayan government agencies, while developing a more consistent, hybrid platform for teams to build and host AI models. 

Similarly, the State of Michigan’s Department of Technology, Management, and Budget (DTMB) consolidated and standardised the state’s IT infrastructure to support internal and citizen-facing services for 19 state agencies with a shared platform.

The department achieved this by migrating to a container-based infrastructure based on RedHat’s OpenShift to create a scalable foundation for future cloud adoption without relying on a single vendor. 

Belgium’s Digitaal Vlaanderen, which provides digital solutions for the Flemish Government, also leveraged on RedHat’s OpenShift to modernise its data-sharing platform MAGDA to facilitate inter-agency collaboration and support increased adoption of the platform across the country. 

Resilient e-Gov services

When government departments move to the cloud, it is imperative that they’re not anchored to just one cloud service provider.  

Cyberattack or an outage in one service ​​​​provider​​​ ​could lead to a loss of trust in the government, if the services were compromised due to no alternative cloud backup.​     ​ 

In such circumstances, the cost of redeploying applications and redeveloping tools could be considerable. 

Regulations around the world also mandate a multi-cloud strategy as operational resilience remains one of the top supervisory priorities for enterprises and governments globally. 

​​​Government departments can enhance their operational resiliency with an open hybrid cloud approach that provides interoperability for traditional and modern applications, allowing for more flexibility to deploy and move applications across different environments, which help governments to comply with local regulations and reduce the risk of relying on a single cloud.

IT automation also helps to maintain regulatory compliance by streamlining migration and deployment processes with little to no human intervention, minimising the risk of manual errors. 

To subscribe to the GovInsider bulletin, click here. 

Unlocking returns with modernisation

A cloud environment provides government agencies the ​​​​opportunity to step​​​​ away from legacy systems and the high risks and costs associated with maintaining outdated technology. 

New Zealand’s Transpower, responsible for designing, building, and maintaining New Zealand’s national electricity grid, used Red Hat solutions and enterprise​ ​open-source technologies to usher in a development-first approach in their modernisation journey evolving around people capability, processes, and technology changes.  

Transpower New Zealand’s Head of Application Services, Arosha Aluwihare, said: “We’ve been able to use Red Hat Consulting expertise to QA our designs and help us troubleshoot during implementation to speed up problem resolution. The Red Hat team brings a great customer lens and understands what it means to run real-time systems.” 

In 2019, Korea Land and Housing (LH) Corporation, under South Korea’s Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, and Transport (MOLIT), sought to create a new platform, COMPAS, to apply insights from the data that it collected during its work. 

To do this, LH chose Red Hat OpenShift as the foundation of COMPAS, running in a public cloud environment managed by implementation partner Gabia. 

OpenShift’s enterprise Kubernetes container platform provided a consistent yet adaptable foundation for rapid application and service development.  

“We chose Red Hat OpenShift because we needed a solution that would standardise all of our development frameworks and tools, including open-source community solutions like CentOS and Apache Tomcat,” said Hyung Gil Lee, Deputy Head, Korea Land and Housing Corporation (LH).  

Conclusion 

Red Hat’s enterprise ​​open-source technologies help government agencies achieve their mission to serve citizens, respond to crises, and build public trust while improving the security, stability, and privacy of networks. 

With a focus on three critical elements, people, process and technology, Red Hat helps eliminate barriers between IT and business stakeholders and shift cultural barriers so that government agencies have more ​consistency ​and collaboration among its staff and between agencies.