Public administration benefits from the cloud

Government organizations face numerous challenges. On the one hand, they have to cope with the still existing tasks associated with the Covid 19 pandemic. On the other hand, the public expects greater flexibility and efficiency from politics and administration as well as a benefit-oriented provision of services. In order to fulfill these tasks, there is no way around the digital transformation of processes at the federal, state and local levels.

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In the context of digital transformation, the cloud inevitably comes into play, and by no means only in the corporate environment, but increasingly also in the public sector. However, various questions arise around the use of cloud services, particularly in the public sector.

What about data sovereignty when parts of the IT run in the cloud? Who guarantees privacy, IT security and data protection in the cloud? Anyone looking for answers to these questions must first and foremost recognize that not all clouds are the same. The possible forms range from private and public to hybrid and multi-cloud.

For government agencies, a hybrid cloud model is often the ideal entry point for optimally leveraging the potential of private and public clouds. A hybrid cloud model that includes on-premise and off-premise resources offers the best of both worlds: the scalability of a public cloud and the flexibility of a private cloud for implementing government requirements in areas such as security, data storage and processing, or risk management.

Hybrid models thus enable public authorities to use the most suitable IT environment and platform for different workloads and requirements. Digital transformation and hybrid cloud use inevitably lead to the topic of open source. The power of open source comes to full fruition in hybrid cloud scenarios in particular, because the range of services from the cloud is growing every day.

Proprietary solutions have a serious disadvantage compared to open source: they do not give public authorities the freedom of choice to use the cloud services and functionalities that precisely meet their requirements. And this flexibility corresponds with the current initiatives of many public administrations: They are increasingly pursuing an open source strategy.

SAP provides a good example of how the cloud issue is also increasingly affecting the public sector. SAP users must have completed the migration of existing databases to SAP HANA and existing applications to SAP S/4HANA by 2027 at the latest. The migration of previous systems to the new generation of solutions not only promises higher availability, but also solves one of the administration's biggest challenges to date: it facilitates the exchange of data between different user areas and organizations. If desired and permitted by regulation, access to SAP databases in the cloud is possible from any location.

In view of the specific economic, technical and regulatory requirements of public authorities, a wide variety of deployment scenarios are also conceivable for SAP S/4HANA: from the private cloud in the local data center through the public cloud to hybrid cloud or managed services use. Hybrid cloud is often the right approach, even in the SAP context, to give the cloud and thus digitization in the public sector an additional boost.

Of course, the SAP issue affects administration in the DACH region to varying degrees. In some cases, SAP applications are only widespread in the areas of human resources and finance. In Switzerland, however, for example, various SAP platforms are already used across the board by the federal government, cantons and municipalities.

In general, the public sector can ensure a high level of flexibility, cost-effectiveness and performance in its IT with a cloud environment. In this way, it also creates a basic prerequisite for driving forward digitization, which is also an absolute must for public administration: not only in terms of optimizing administrative processes, but above all in terms of improving services for citizens.