Public sector organisations are being forced to rethink long-term technology strategies as supply chain disruption, rising costs, skills shortages and geopolitical uncertainty place increasing pressure on digital services. At the same time, growing interest in hybrid cloud, containers and AI is reshaping infrastructure priorities across government.
In this Q&A, Andrew Puddephatt, director UK public sector at Nutanix, discusses why flexibility, portability and operational simplicity are becoming critical for maintaining resilience in an unpredictable environment.
Public sector organisations are dealing with ongoing disruption across supply chains, costs and technology. From what you’re seeing, how is this affecting their ability to keep essential services running day to day?
I think it’s fair to say that very few people foresaw the level of disruption we’re now seeing in the technology supply chain and, since most digital strategies in public sector are based on a three to five-year cost model with assumptions made around future costs, these strategies are often having to be rethought.
The cost of delivering essential services will inevitably go up but there is no funding mechanism to react to these issues as they occur. What we are seeing is organisations having to redirect funding, often from innovation programmes, to fund the increased cost of delivering core services.
We’re hearing more about hybrid models being used to keep projects moving. How are organisations using cloud alongside existing environments to respond quickly when plans change?
Over the past decade or so we have seen public sector organisations making strategic decisions around their approach to ‘Cloud First’ but this has morphed into ‘Cloud Appropriate.’
Rather than take a wholesale all-in cloud or all-on-premises approach, most of public sector are taking a hybrid approach, deploying applications and workloads on the most appropriate platform.
What we’re not seeing as much of is architecting that hybrid platform to allow portability between cloud and on-prem environments which allows you quickly react to market conditions and pivot toward cloud or on-prem depending on the challenges.
Skills shortages remain a major issue in government. How is that shaping technology decisions?
Skills shortages exist across the whole technology landscape, but it’s most acutely felt in public sector where there is a pay gap between the public and private sector.
Introducing a hybrid cloud model is a positive approach to mitigating risk of disruption but it can also bring in additional cloud skills requirements which are scarce and expensive.
If you liked this content…
We are seeing a lot of the public sector entities we work with adopting a common operating model and single management plane to simplify the way they manage IT, removing their reliance on costly resources.
How is the current geopolitical and economic climate changing the conversation around digital sovereignty?
When we think about digital sovereignty we often think about location and nationality but it’s really about control, operability, autonomy – and mitigating against external factors that could impact our ability to deliver public services.
I personally can’t recall a time of greater unpredictability. While we can plan for disruption in the supply chain, we also need to consider the impact of things like tariffs and operational restrictions where we have a reliance on third-party suppliers.
If you have a cloud strategy then you also need a cloud exit strategy and if you are running your IT on premises then you also need a plan to deal with the current challenges we are seeing.
Therefore, I believe portability and agility in infrastructure platforms is a key aspect in retaining digital sovereignty.
How are containers, Kubernetes and AI workloads changing public sector infrastructure priorities?
Every public sector organisation we talk to is beginning to plan for containers and even if they are not planning on adopting them for internal IT, their application providers will be releasing new versions based on containers so Kubernetes management should definitely be on the agenda.
The challenge is this brings in the need for a new skill set and, again, these are scarce and expensive currently so it’s important to look to adopt a management platform for Kubernetes that can enable your existing IT teams to run these.
AI has huge potential for good in public sector but does not come without some risks. We are seeing concerns around a new phase of ‘shadow IT’ and, where there is a lack of governance, the costs associated with poor GPU and token management.
We’re working with many of our public sector customers to help them extend their existing infrastructure management platform to the management of AI workloads and the underpinning Kubernetes environment to mitigate risks and enable their IT teams to run these.
