IT Governance in the Public Sector: Make the jump to the Cloud
Posted on Mon, Sep 12, 2011
Embracing the benefits of the Cloud for IT organizations, many companies have decided to transition from old-fashioned on-premise solutions to innovative cloud-based applications. The difference has been quite dramatic as many of those who switched have managed to achieve greater efficiency, gain more visibility as well as decrease the overall total cost of ownership. However, public sector overall has been relatively slow in embracing the transition to cloud-based solutions and still shows some hesitation towards the SaaS model.
Vivek Kundra, former first CIO of the US Government, has noted in his recent article in New York Times that his team saw an opportunity “to increase productivity and save costs by embracing the cloud computing revolution: the shift from hardware and software that individuals, businesses and governments buy and then maintain themselves, to low-cost, maintenance-free services that are based on the Internet and run by private companies”.
With tight budgets and shrinking IT resources, governmental agencies have to be smart about their IT investments and embrace solutions that yield higher ROIs at lower TCO. Kundra states that in healthcare, for example, increases in productivity through cloud-based services would represent a $300 billion value over the next 10 years. And these are numbers that cannot be ignored. The SaaS model has proven to be cost-efficient, and many organizations in both the public and private sectors can leverage it to their advantage.
In the economy where smart budgeting becomes a priority, many IT shops struggle to align their projects with strategic initiatives while resources are limited and pressure increases. Cloud security may be another issue that often prevents implementation of SaaS solutions in the public sector. However, cloud applications are becoming not only more robust but also more secure as they pass security certifications. Innotas, for example, is SAS 70 compliant, which means that it uses its enterprise architecture to protect the solution at all levels including the application, facilities and network.
As an example, here is the cloud success story from one of Innotas customers, the State of North Carolina Office of Information Technology Services. The challenge within their PMO was in finding a solution that would allow consolidating numerous projects within IT and ensuring that each and every project was executed on time and within budget. Innotas cloud-based IT Governance and project portfolio management solution helped the State of North Carolina to not only increase productivity and project transparency, but also stay within its budget limits and avoid additional overhead costs. Read full story here.
To sum it up, cloud applications provide superior functionality and are more or equally secure as many of the existing on-premise solutions while providing these benefits at a lower total cost of ownershop and faster time-to-value.
- Innotas Team