Public sector still dragging its heels on cloud

The public sector remains slow to adopt cloud – despite a recent a recent update to the government’s cloud-first policy.

The government has said that when procuring new or existing services, public sector organisations should default to public cloud first, using other solutions only where this is not possible. This approach is mandatory for central government, and strongly recommended to the wider public sector.

But new research shows 92 percent of government-related data still stored on-premise. This compared to 81 percent of IT infrastructure still not stored in the cloud in the private sector, according to the survey by monitoring firm, Paessler AG.

This, said the firm, suggests a belief that on-premise is the safest way to store data and to protect it from being hacked, despite government clouds being designed to meet the compliance and security requirements of government customers.

“It’s clear that cloud adoption is the number one challenge for IT leaders; it’s not that easy to lift and shift. Infrastructures are complex and it takes time to modernise,” said Martin Hodgson, regional sales manager, Northern Europe at Paessler AG.

The also research found that just 25 percent of UK and 19 percent of global storage infrastructure is in the cloud.

However, while cloud adoption is still slow, over two-thirds (64 percent) of businesses believe that they will have more IT infrastructure in the cloud over the next two years.  Surprisingly, despite recent buzz, AI is yet to enter IT leaders’ top five challenges, with them instead listing ‘resilient infrastructure’ in second place, ‘data storage’ ranking in third place, ‘operational technology’ in fourth place and finally ‘automation and robotics’ in fifth place.

Slow going on sustainability

In addition to slow cloud adoption, Paessler also found that globally only 37 percent of companies have started to work on sustainable IT strategies. The Americas were the furthest behind, with just 26 percent starting to work on sustainable IT strategies and more than half (52 percent) of respondents stating it is not a priority yet. Scandinavian countries rank the highest, with 56 percent having started to work on sustainable IT strategies, followed by the UK & Ireland with 49 percent.

This year has witnessed an increase in organisations working on sustainable IT strategies with the number rising from 33 percent to 37 percent. However, despite growing awareness 15 percent (vs only six percent last year) believe that sustainability is ‘not at all important’ to their overall business agenda. While IT admins may be focused on maintaining business continuity, it is important not to overlook the tools available to monitor environmental factors such as energy consumption, which could be a key factor in any sustainability strategy.