HPE: Creating a ‘Consciously Hybrid’ Public Sector – taking a ‘cloud appropriate’ approach

Back in 2013, we all heard the call to ‘Cloud-First’ loud and clear. The aim was to bring the public sector up to date, to take advantage of modern technologies that private organisations were seeing as well as making services more effective whilst saving money. However, the focus was on where data resided, with the aim to ‘get to the cloud’ as quickly as possible. If the focus had been on how, with a longer-term view on desired outcomes and value, maybe the shift of public sector IT infrastructure would have looked significantly different, and ultimately transformation achieved at a faster pace.  

An unplanned state of flux?  

The promise of the public cloud offered the agility, scalability and flexibility to support the demands of digital transformation, and early successes have been rightly recognised. However, as early adopters of mainframe technology, transformative of their time, many public sector organisations still find themselves heavily reliant on these same proprietaries, on-premise solutions, decades later.  

The friction between Government-led guidance and the realities of execution has, in some cases, left cloud strategies disjointed and incomplete or at worst, completely stalled, with many public sector organisations finding themselves ‘Unconsciously Hybrid’. 

In fact, in a recent Hewlett Packard Enterprise study, 63% of the public sector respondents stated they did not have a formal cloud strategy. Stuck between two conflicting business models, the widening gap between old and new infrastructure has led to rising costs and inefficiencies; the UK government spends £2.3bn each year maintaining and supporting legacy systems. 

Understanding where we’ve been, and where we’re going 

In a first of its kind documentary, we interviewed public-sector technologists responsible for driving change - unearthing the realities, exploring the historic stumbling blocks and discovering how some public sector organisations are navigating a more conscious path in their digital journeys.  

You can view the ‘Consciously Hybrid’ documentary series here.  

Cloud as an experience 

Many apps that can easily move to the public cloud already have. Meanwhile, a significant number remain on-premises due to issues such as data gravity, sovereignty, compliance, cost, and interdependencies with other systems. Done right, a hybrid cloud model provides a cloud-like experience, unifying insights and operations across edges, datacentres, colocation facilities, and clouds, enabling organizations to reach their digital transformation goals.  

With a hybrid cloud, you can run your workloads where they are best suited without sacrificing the benefits of the cloud experience, including agile scale-up for quicker innovation and iteration, a unified platform to maintain security and compliance while also tracking resource consumption and optimizing costs, all with the self-service ease and convenience of public cloud to infrastructure, apps, and workloads.  

Find out more about the cloud that comes to you.

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This article was written by Chris Burnett, UK Sales Manager – Public Sector, HPE. Chris has worked in the technology sector for 21 years and joined Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) in 2010. In that time he has almost exclusively worked with UK Public Sector customers in a variety of roles including as a client executive for some of largest central government departments.  He now leads HPE’s Pointnext Services Public Sector sales team and is passionate about improving the lives of UK citizens through technology and innovation, and the acceleration of digital transformation. Read more...

To learn more about Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), please visit their LinkedIN and Twitter.

On Tuesday 5 April, techUK was delighted to host the Cabinet Office and industry representatives for the launch event for the UK Government’s Digital, Data and Technology Sourcing Playbook which was published on 28 March 2022. The DDaT Sourcing Playbook sets out guidance – in one place – as to how digital projects and programmes are assessed, procured and delivered in central government departments, arms-length bodies and the wider public sector. Through the application of what is commercial best practice, the Playbook addresses 11 key policies and six cross-cutting priorities that will ensure government gets things right from the start when it comes to procurement.

You can watch the recording of the launch event in full here:

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