Governments cling to private cloud despite inexorable public cloud adoption

The need to scale still battling security worries ... on both sides

Governments continue to adopt cloud services, for better or worse, hoping to modernize their IT services, leading big cloud operators to aggressively court public sector bodies for lucrative contracts.

36 percent said their organization still operates an internal private cloud as their primary platform

Around the world, cloud-first policies such as those adopted by the US, UK, and South Korea are driving adoption, according to Forrester Research's new report, "The State Of Cloud In Government," based on its 2024 Cloud Survey.

But it finds that the public cloud operators aren't having it all their way. While 80 percent of decision-makers in government bodies report using a hybrid cloud arrangement, 36 percent said their organization still operates an internal private cloud as their primary platform.

Security is still seen as the biggest issue in cloud procurement, although curiously, this was cited as both the top reason for adopting public cloud (by 34 percent of respondents in the survey) and the chief concern about adopting it (by 28 percent of respondents), perhaps because of the loss of control in handing over organizational workloads to what is basically just someone else's computer.

Forrester says that what public sector bodies most value from the public cloud is scale, and help in meeting compliance regulations, but also responsiveness – giving them the flexibility to quickly deploy extra resources as needed in the event of an unexpected crisis or policy change.

Government organizations also see it as a route to digital modernization, tackling problems like technical debt as part of the process of moving workloads to the cloud. The survey found that 29 percent of decision-makers indicated that modernizing core applications was among their most likely initiatives for the next 12 months.

However, there are also concerns that the complexity of managing cloud networks and a lack of aligned internal governance could impact operations.

The report says that systems integrators and managed service providers play a key role in government cloud initiatives, helping to fill skill gaps through education and training programs, and by providing managed services in support of operations.

Forrester notes that hyperscalers are aggressively courting government bodies with their ability to offer more capabilities and services than traditional on-premises options.

One thing it doesn't mention, however, is that those companies typically use the lure of hefty discounts to draw in public sector bodies and lock them in to multi-year contracts, as was revealed by the recent investigation into the cloud market by the UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA).

The report also notes that some of the hyperscalers offer services designed to meet specific requirements, such as cloud regions dedicated to US government organizations, operated by AWS, Microsoft, and Oracle.

Forrester claims that local cloud service providers (CSPs) continue to win contracts for economic, legal, or national security reasons, yet also finds that public bodies generally choose hyperscalers for the wide range of services on offer. Smaller providers only tend to win if regulatory or political concerns are in play or they are a good fit for a particular niche use case, it says.

But sometimes this can backfire. In Britain, the collapse of local provider UKCloud in 2022 caused business continuity issues for a number of public sector agencies, including local governments, police forces, and even the Ministry of Defence.

Nevertheless, some governments, such as France and Japan, are investing in and subsidizing local alternatives to the global cloud giants in order to create domestic champions and avoid complete dependence on foreign firms. This has no doubt been given extra impetus in light of recent events. ®