Australians expect effortless digital engagements from their commercial brands and service providers, so it should be no surprise if they want the same from public sector agencies.
According to PwC’s 2022 report Bringing all citizens on the digital journey, more than 85 percent of citizens say speed, simplicity, convenience, transparency, and security are important for government services.
And it’s not just citizens whose expectations have risen. Public sector workers also want to spend more time helping people and less time managing administrative processes.
For agency leaders, this has created a pressing need to modernise technology platforms, to enhance their agility, functionality and security, and to provide the foundations for newer technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), geolocation services and advanced identity management.
The result has been a steady migration of agencies’ applications to cloud services. But while the cloud can deliver immediate benefits in the form of enhanced flexibility and pay-as-you-go pricing, getting full value over the longer term requires a fundamental change in how services are conceived, delivered, and operated.
As many agencies are learning, cloud modernisation is an ongoing commitment, rather than a discreet project.
The cloud’s role in modern public sector agencies
The cloud is often characterised as a transformer of technology, but its true value comes from the way it enables transformation for organisations. Cloud migration creates pathways to the adoption of modern processes, frameworks, and methodologies, such as agile and development, security, and operations (DevSecOps), which emphasise iterative development over monolithic delivery, and makes it easier for agencies to continually update services to meet tomorrow’s needs.
These changes are fundamental, but they are also essential for leaders who place the needs of citizens at the heart of their change programs, and who accept that those needs will evolve over time.
These changing needs demand the creation of new ways to measure service performance and users’ expectations, to ensure they stay aligned. This includes the adoption of new governance structures that ensure modernisation is delivered within appropriate guardrails. Thankfully, modern development methods enable these guardrails to be encoded directly within project plans, the delivery program, and the ongoing operational process.
This means project teams can make decisions quickly but with certainty, and gives the operations team a method to easily provide feedback into planning and delivery, to ensure that services evolve in line with changing requirements.
Ensuring effective modernisation
As the creators of the modern cloud, Amazon Web Services (AWS) has unrivalled global experience with helping public sector agencies to maximise the value of the cloud.
One example is eHealth NSW, where the migration of clinical applications into the AWS Cloud has led to avoided costs, reduced capital and expenditure, and improvements in productivity equivalent to US$16 million in savings.
More than 144,000 collective hours of productivity have been saved for frontline clinicians, and for its Enterprise Patient Records application, eHealth NSW has realised a ten-fold improvement in performance and a 70 per cent reduction in critical incidents.
eHealth NSW can now implement enhancements to applications up to 50 per cent faster and launch new environments in under four hours – a task that would have taken six- to eight-weeks previously.
Help throughout the journey
Results like this come from looking beyond individual projects in favour of longer-term approaches to modernisation, and AWS offers numerous services that ensure customers stay on track throughout their journeys.
AWS’s Trusted Advisor service provides recommendations that help agencies follow best practices for migration and development, while the AWS Well-Architected Tool helps them constantly evaluate the state of their applications and workloads and find opportunities for improvements.
At the infrastructure level, AWS’s latest generation Graviton processor delivers up to a 40 per cent price performance improvement, while its S3 Intelligent-Tiering is the only cloud storage class that delivers automatic cost savings when data access patterns change.
These benefits flow directly from Amazon’s Culture of Innovation, whose key principles include the requirement to start by considering the needs of customers, and then work backwards to find the right solution. This principle can be readily adopted by any agency that wants to exceed the expectations of citizens by putting their needs first.
Another core tenet of AWS’s culture is the understanding of whether a decision represents a ‘one-way door’ or a ‘two-way door’. While a trip through a two-way door is reversable, passing through a one-way door is not. Knowing the difference goes a long way to reducing risk in rapid innovation.
Critical cloud foundations
This culture is only made possible by the strong foundations of AWS’s cloud service, and the ongoing work that ensures it exceeds the needs of modern organisations and agencies in terms of performance, flexibility, functionality, and security.
Today, AWS has more than 200 fully featured services supporting a wide range of technologies, industries, and use cases. AWS was one of the first cloud providers certified as a Strategic Hosting Provider in the Australian Government’s Hosting Certification Framework in 2021, and 139 of AWS’s services been assessed by an independent IRAP assessor as having the applicable controls required for Australian government workloads at the PROTECTED level.
AWS’s multi-billion-dollar investment in technology infrastructure across Australia ensures it can meet any agency’s requirements for security, disaster-recovery, and on-shore hosting of data.
These capabilities are delivered through an extensive network of partners with experience in meeting the needs of public sector agencies, from the world’s largest consultancies to local born-in-the-cloud developers and systems integrators.
Cloud migration is often cited as the goal of modernisation efforts, but migration itself is only one step in a continuous journey of ongoing improvement.
Long-term success in the cloud comes from understanding that modernisation requires a new approach to project methodologies – one that allows ongoing iterative delivery without placing undue strain on delivery teams. When fully embraced, this approach transforms agencies into adaptive learning organisations that can better sense and respond to changing needs.
As leaders in cloud computing, AWS can assist agencies to create applications and services that are scalable, adaptable, sustainable, and secure, and can provide the processes and frameworks that ensure value is delivered over the long term.
To learn more about cloud modernisation, watch the latest AWS ANZ Summit sessions on demand here.
