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/ Canadian Government Executive
// September 2016
John
Weigelt
Moving to the Cloud:
A strategic approach
T
oday’s transformative move-
ment towards a more digital and
connected government is driven
by the technological trends of
big data, social networks, the “Internet of
Things,” machine learning and bots. These
technologies can interact with one an-
other, because they all share the common
foundation of cloud computing. Govern-
ments see the benefit of these new techno-
logical trends and are nowmoving to cloud
computing.
Over the last five years, I have had the
opportunity to help government service
delivery leaders ease the transition of mov-
ing from their government-hosted com-
puting systems to Microsoft’s enterprise
public cloud services. We’ve been able to
Strategy
help these transitions through minor ad-
justments to their approach to IT service
delivery and by innovating with new con-
nected government models for assurance.
Moving to the cloud presents its own
challenges for public sector organizations.
When organizations embark upon a cloud
project, they typically encounter three
project frictions that can delay cloud adop-
tion: procurement, technology and trust.
In Procurement, governments at first of-
ten encounter consumer-oriented, “what-
you-see-is what-you-get” service agree-
ments that are generally ill-suited for their
needs. This often creates procurement
delays that slow projects so that they can’t
take advantage of the agility that cloud
computing promises. By working with gov-
ernments closely to evolve existing licens-
ing agreements that meet public sector
needs and deploying enterprise-friendly
ones, we can help manage the challenges
faced by IT decision-makers.
Technology: the delay surrounding tech-
nology is usually driven by fears that the
existing government systems will not work
with the cloud services. By working more
closely with a wider variety of organiza-
tions, from Open Source to large commer-
cial software developers, we ensure that
applications work across platforms, on a
wide variety of devices and in a cloud mod-
el of their choosing. For instance, through
Microsoft’s hybrid cloud environment, gov-
ernments can deploy the cloud on their
terms—whether it be on-premise, in the
public cloud or in between depending on
their own needs. With the help of a wide
variety of Azure certified applications, gov-
ernments can find familiar platforms such
as LINUX, SAP, Oracle and others to ease
moving existing workloads to the public
cloud.
The third area that presented delays is
that of trust, or more specifically adequate
data protection—where public service lead-
ers must meet legal and privacy obligations
to help safeguard their data. We created a
secure in-Canada cloud platform that is de-
signed to meet government regulations and
compliance requirements. We have estab-
lished datacentres in Quebec City and To-
ronto, so government decision-makers have
the additional reassurance that their data
resides in a Canadian cloud. The confidence
in the security and privacy safeguards pro-