Cloud Boosts Delivery of Government Services During Pandemic, Other Crises
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Connecting state and local government leaders
However, state CIOs say there are barriers to transitioning to the cloud, including financial and workforce issues, according to a report.
When the Covid-19 pandemic first hit, state government agencies needed to continue to effectively deliver services to citizens, including responding to an unprecedented number of unemployment claims and demands for more social and health care services, according to a report by the National Association of State Chief Information Officers.
As states around the country responded, they quickened the move to remote and hybrid workforces, digital services and elastic cloud solutions, leveraging new funding sources and distributing financial relief, building new programs and establishing new operating models, according to the report.
The report shows that the cloud can be a tool to help states prepare to rapidly, like during the pandemic, adapt their capacity and meet surges in demand.
According to Investopedia, cloud computing is the delivery of services through the internet. These resources include tools and applications like data storage, servers, databases, networking and software. The cloud makes it possible to save a lot of information to a remote database rather than trying to save it all to a local hard drive.
The cloud market has evolved significantly since the early 2000s when limited software as a service, infrastructure as a service providers and platform as a service were offered in the marketplace. As the service delivery model grew in popularity, the number of providers grew with the number of companies offering SaaS, from 450 in 2000 to more than 15,000 in 2020, the report contends.
Cloud Barriers
While the report shows many benefits of the cloud, state CIOs have identified key barriers to transitioning to use it as:
- Budget and financial
- Cybersecurity management
- Procurement
- Workforce
CIOs in the survey indicated that certain functionalities were missing from vendors’ cloud offerings, and integration, pricing and transparency topped the list of areas that can be improved by cloud service providers.
Despite having access to best practices, lessons learned and proof of concept resources, each organization should chart its unique course to assure an optimized cloud operation is realized, according to NASCIO.
To help more consistently measure and understand a state organization’s capabilities at a moment in time, a self-assessment tool is provided as a companion to this report. The tool rates the state organization’s capability maturity in 40 key cloud controls and rates each organization on a scale of zero to five, where zero indicates no capability for a particular control, and five indicating capabilities are highly optimized.
For more information from the NASCIO report click here.
Andre Claudio is the assistant editor for Route Fifty.
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