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2020 will be remembered for a lot of things, not least the acceleration of digital adoption across the public sector to transform the delivery of front-line public services in response to the challenges caused by COVID-19. With recent news, we can all begin to hope that both COVID-19 and Brexit will soon be behind us, so the focus must shift to how the UK can lead the world in recovery and begin to thrive again. The recent spending review announced a National Infrastructure Strategy to “level up” the country through investments in physical infrastructure, and UKCloud believes that similar focus and investment by the UK Public Sector in digital infrastructure will be key in driving the future of the UK economy.

Policies like “Cloud First” and “Digital by Default” have been key in enabling the public sector to embrace this recent period of accelerated digitalisation. But there remains a significant number of public sector systems and services that are dependent on expensive and inefficient legacy IT. In a recent speech at techUK, Julia Lopez, Parliamentary Secretary for the Cabinet Office, said “Much of what we want to do now - and in the future - is held back by current structures and systems. That clearly includes moving beyond Legacy IT and getting government departments and agencies into the cloud”. This echoes the response to UKCloud’s State of Cloud Adoption Survey in which 45% of respondents said they would not consider using public cloud for traditional IT environments that are not cloud-native, whilst a further 32% discredited its use for legacy systems. Yet almost 9 out of 10 respondents expressed a universal desire to move IT environments into the Cloud if there was a “perfect solution”.

Hence, the conversation is shifting from “How do I build new systems in the cloud?” to “How do I make all my systems cheaper, safer and better?”. Given the spread of challenges that public sector organisations face (from budget, through skills, to compliance), a single cloud can never be the ‘perfect solution’. Indeed, there is already a rich tapestry of cloud solutions from a large number of UK businesses – many of which are specifically designed to address the unique challenges of modernising legacy environments. UKCloud has built a community that includes many of these organisations and has created a sovereign platform within the government’s Crown Campus. This environment is ideally suited to those legacy and traditional IT systems that are not appropriate for global clouds especially in light of the recent EU ruling (Schrems II) which invalidates the data protection provided under Privacy Shield.

Further, the recent release of the new National Data Strategy advocates a similar philosophy with regards to data. It cites examples where innovative technologies such as Artificial Intelligence are impeded because organisations have not yet got the basics right in how data is stored, protected and shared. If the UK is to treat data as a national asset, organisations must harness the value of the data left languishing in legacy IT systems.

“With data now a critical part of modern life, we need to ensure the infrastructure underpinning it is safe, secure, and resilient. The infrastructure on which data relies is a vital national asset – one that supports our economy, delivers public services, and drives growth – and we need to protect it appropriately from security risks and other potential service disruption. As our economy and public services become increasingly dependent on data, the security and resilience of the infrastructure on which data relies will also become more important.” said Simon Hansford, CEO at UKCloud.

Organisations should focus on three key areas in order to build an appropriate digital foundation which harnesses the existing data and capabilities deployed across the UK public sector:
• Compatibility – By establishing strategic fit through a cloud methodology, UK Public Sector can migrate legacy IT applications to the cloud with very low risk. UKCloud is offering a Data Strategy Assessment to help organisations create an affordable and actionable plan to maximise their systems and data.
• Resilience – As the only UK sovereign Strategic Cloud Provider with government-approved secure facilities and security cleared staff, UKCloud brings the power of multi-cloud services into the most secure and sensitive environments – and makes it easy to connect and share information between security domains – all with high availability.
• Cost – Up-to 80% of an organisations IT resources is focused on merely ‘keeping the lights on’ for traditional and legacy systems. By focusing on these systems, UKCloud will help organisations demonstrate clear cost savings and enhanced value for money, as formalised in its recent MOU agreement with Crown Commercial Services.