Around 85% of decision makers in UK public sector organisations are using some form of public cloud services, which highlights that the public sector is taking significant steps towards the digital transformation driven by cloud services.
The findings from a study conducted by EMC, VCE and VMware, reveal that 60% of the respondents used some form of public cloud services with or without proper validation from IT.
Around 36% of the respondents claimed that they used cloud for back-up and recovery of data, and 35% claimed that they used the next generation service for hosting internal applications.
The results show that the public sector IT departments need hybrid cloud strategy that will provide decision makers with controlled, compliant yet easy to access cloud services.
34% of the respondents claimed that the main reason they chose to buy-in external cloud services is because it is affordable, 23% siad that it was easy to use and 20% said that public cloud was the right solution for the application they were using.
VMware Public Sector Strategy head Andy Tait said: "The findings from this research are very positive for the public sector.
"Line of businesses are using public cloud services to drive efficiencies across the organisation – both for employees to access data inside the organisation, and to speed the delivery of citizen-focused services, for example passport applications, that fluctuate at times throughout the year.
"In order for the UK public sector to drive efficiencies in a secure, flexible, agile and compliant manner, business users need to look at embracing a hybrid cloud strategy that can provide portability of workloads, one set of management tools and deliver services such as disaster recovery and built in security – without the cost of having to investing in unnecessary resources and tools."
