Cloud technology is enabler for agile and adaptive government
Since 2017, the Digital Transformation Agency has been leading the push to make the Australian government fit for the digital age.
This drive recognises that government today needs to be agile, responsive and innovative. To achieve this governments are looking to secure cloud technology that enables them to quickly deliver new platforms, create a culture of continuous improvement, provide easier access to services and focus on improved service delivery.
Nick Herbert, Head of Portfolio, Applications and Multi-Cloud at Fujitsu Oceania, sees how governments are in a state of flux.
"Constant change is just a predominant factor in their ecosystem, whether it's legislative changes, political changes or health shifts as we've seen recently," he said.
At the back end, overly complex internal systems and silos of data limit change and adaptability, while on the front end, citizens are expecting easy to use, universally available government services, accessed via a single log in. Solving this problem is where secure cloud services come in.
"Having an adaptive and agile applications and cloud service ecosystem is essential to support that shift," said Herbert.
Moving to secure cloud-based services will enable higher operational efficiency, reduce cost bases and allow more flexibility for the future while creating space for innovation. Already, early public sector adopters are using cloud architectures to deploy artificial intelligence and machine learning.
But, how do we get there?
Not all governments are at the same stage of the cloud adoption process and what that process will look like will depend on the underlying strategy and priorities. To get users to where they need to be, Herbert and Fujitsu have taken their customers on a journey.
"We start off with cloud advisory services, helping customers work out what's their strategy and what their priorities are so we can select the right set of capabilities that support them, and then we transform and migrate applications and provide ongoing support services which are focused on continual optimisation," he said.
Rather than building a bespoke solution from scratch, Fujitsu leverage their existing secure architectures and their existing knowledge base of cloud providers such as Microsoft and Vault and use standardised building blocks to deliver a protected cloud almost at the click of a button.
"We're not dealing with all the wiring, that's set, instead we are focused on how the applications integrate together and how we can share data between departments to maximise the value that they can get from the platform," explained Herbert.
The Fujitsu Secure Cloud Portfolio is built with close partnership with cloud providers and provides surety that the Fujitsu service, platform, architecture, processes and procedures are all assessed and certified to secure data from the PROTECTED classification and above.
From this base, Fujitsu can ensure that the customers can extract the most value from their secure digital investments. This means, said Herbert, that from a government perspective "when departments engage with Fujitsu we can focus on what means the most to them rather than getting caught up in that basic security layer".
In addition to local expertise, Fujitsu have proven experience from over a decade of delivering secure cloud services to governments from Japan to the UK and Finland, as well as other countries around the globe. In these cases, cloud technology has been the enabler for the next generation of government services, said Herbert
"With secure cloud, government departments gain access to a whole host of extra technology. You can do video analytics, data analysis and predictive modelling.
"You increase that department or the government's ability to change society for the better."
Fujitsu has a heritage of service excellence in managing massively complex services across multiple geographies and industries over many decades. This mission critical expertise is coupled with its more recent experience in transformative applications, customer experiential and digital services with technologies such as cloud and AI. Find out more about Fujitsu's expertise with secure cloud based services here.
