Innovation in the private sector is accelerating at an unprecedented rate. But with increasingly restricted budgets, rigorous regulatory requirements and a far greater number of stakeholders to engage with, progress is relatively slow for the public sector. This can result in the perception of government organisations being digital laggards behind much more technologically advanced private sector organisations, especially in the eyes of taxpayers wishing to see greater value in the form of digital citizen services.
IT modernisation in government is more important today than ever before. Population growth, an increasingly complex regulatory environment around data privacy and higher demand for citizen services to match expectations of digital experiences by the private sector, all need to be addressed. These challenges can no longer be put off, but governments do not need to walk this path alone.
With a hybrid cloud solution provided by VMware Cloud on AWS, governments can benefit from a best-of-both-worlds experience from two industry-leading partners in private and public cloud. VMware and Amazon Web Services bring a truly differentiated and compelling jointly engineered solution to customers, that can ensure a seamless, sustainable and secure digital transformation journey for the governments along the way.
Why VMware Cloud on AWS for IT modernization in the Government sector?
One of the main goals for governments today is to provide enriched digital experiences for citizens and staff. At the same time, these improvements must aim to reduce capital and operating expenditures by reducing data center footprint, hardware costs, licensing and operating costs. While these objectives may seem at odds with one another, the inherent and simultaneous efficiency and agility offered by a platform like VMware Cloud on AWS offer governments a seamlessly integrated hybrid cloud service.
Public scrutiny of government budgets often mean it is vital that the move to cloud is completed on time and within budget – and with minimal disruption. Failure to achieve these goals could have grave and wide-reaching consequences.
Modernisation challenges of Government IT
Computer, networking and storage requirements often sit in disparate siloes – making it difficult to measure capacity requirements, with the risk of services going offline due to hardware under provisioning. With further disruptions, budgets are often urgently restructured to fix the short-term issue. Flexibility and agility are two of the most important tools at an IT team’s disposal. The easier it is to move workloads between cloud environments, the lower the potential for disruption to occur.
Refactoring existing applications to run in the new environment can be very time-consuming – taking months or even years to complete in the past. By allowing applications to be run in their native format, VMware Cloud on AWS eliminates this entirely, meaning formerly complex and long-term migrations can take place in a matter of weeks, or even days.
VMware Cloud on AWS allows for seamless bi-directional workload migration between vSphere-based private clouds and the AWS Cloud, all within an intrinsically secure platform supported by major regulatory compliance certifications. More importantly, flexible consumption economics means that cloud services can be provisioned on a predicable per-host basis, avoiding cost overruns.
Benefits for citizens and staff
For citizens, the modernisation of government IT manifests in access to enriched, personalised and intelligent digital services to help with anything from housing and waste collection to electoral voting and social care. Looking further ahead, the capacity for innovation unlocked by hybrid cloud will help realise the societal transformation projects of the future, for example, by easing the roll out of smart city initiatives or intelligent public safety programmes – making it easier for staff to achieve their objectives too.
Updating government IT will help also help address business continuity needs – including disaster recovery (DR). While this has always been important to organisations of all sizes, with today’s pandemic and resulting acceleration of digital transformation, it’s now critical to be able to recover a large set of IT services in the event of ransomware or other disasters.
VMware Cloud on AWS is optimised to build and run the applications that will be key to unlocking this vision of the future. In addition to easily integrating existing government apps with native AWS services, governments can also easily build and deploy new applications, spanning data centre, cloud, edge or a combination of the above.
A partnership of excellence
VMware and AWS have a long history of providing regional, national and local government agencies with software products that simplify the overall operation and management of IT. As part of their commitment to deliver technologies that help governments modernise their IT infrastructure, these two industry-leading private and public cloud providers respectively – offer governments hybrid cloud services that enable public sector agencies to leverage a consistent cloud infrastructure, both on-premises and in the public cloud.
Click here to find out how you can modernize your Government IT infrastructure with VMware Cloud on AWS today.
