Published in Housing Technology, May 2021
One of the questions I’m often asked is: “how easy is it to move to public cloud?” There’s only one answer: it depends. Unless we understand exactly what an organisation’s objectives are, and what systems and applications it has (and some organisations don’t know this themselves) it’s impossible to give a definite answer. There are too many variables and dependencies that can affect the end result.
Like most organisations within the public sector, housing associations (HAs) are moving towards a “cloud first” strategy as a way to better engage their tenants via digital services, whilst driving productivity and keeping costs down. Cloud also gives them the flexibility to adapt quickly – which is vital in this sector, where government changes to how housing benefit is paid, for example, require a rapid response from the IT department.
As remote working continues, it provides an opportunity to consider whether your organisation can make more of its business applications available to staff by any means possible e.g. public or private cloud and, crucially, whether you want or need to.
Although local authorities are increasingly moving services to the cloud, they’ve been much slower to do so than central government. After working on cloud implementations with both councils and government agencies, I believe there’s one key reason for this - the wide range of services local authorities provide.
Azure can bring the benefits of productivity, agility and decreased costs to your organisation, but like many things, realising the dream relies upon the preparation before you take the leap. Learn how to rehost and refactor for the cloud.
As an IT Services and Cloud Consultancy for medium to large enterprises in all sectors, we are aware that moving to cloud isn’t a simple choice, especially in the public sector and NHS which have their own issues.
Moving to cloud is not a shortcut. Effective use of any type of cloud requires that all the ‘traditional’ IT disciplines as defined by ITIL and other best practice frameworks are in place and ideally automated. The good news is that most organisations will already have most of the required elements, which may just need to be re-architected or enhanced for cloud.
How much of your business is in the cloud? Many organisations are now using it for email, document sharing, even CRM – but how about your legacy applications?
