Why Shared Services Government should be Hybrid Cloud based?

Cloud Computing has transformed the way how customers are using shared services. The cloud could lets any shared services provider to achieve different agility level where they can acquire processing capability, storage capacity, and applications without the expenses and effort that currently exists when they are using resources that are fully internal to the organization.

Ongoing costs and management of maintenance and upgrades is dramatically lower and operations related to that are significantly reduced. Cloud Computing also allows Governments to maximize the innovation and experimentation achieving government resilience, enabling high-performance computing for government research, and large-scale data storage for powerful analytics that can be integrated in next generation Government solutions that potentially Shared Services Center can provide.

So far so good, right? But it sounds more like a marketing effort than a real integration plan.

Direct transformation to Public Cloud infrastructure (and I don’t mean infrastructure as in IaaS) as a baseline for the Shared Services, where one can find most economically viable business models is not always appropriate, supported or allowed by the legislation of the specific Government. For Shared Services Delivery, Hybrid Cloud Computing is a must, where we integrate resources that are available internally to the organization with the external, vendor based resources into one coherent resources delivery network. Building Shared Services model enable combining external cloud services with internal offerings into a cohesive services organization, all that is possible through hybrid approach to service architecture, were this nicely works for governments that are combining public cloud with local resources for the most flexible and agile shared services model.

image: multiple clouds serving multiple purposes for the Government (diagram from the actual implementation)

Now, I am not advocating specific Public Platform here to be integrated in the Hybrid Cloud.

I could write a book on why Microsoft. Some others could do the same for Amazon. Others will have tough time to explain why IBM or Oracle, but hey, that is just my opinion here. And Google, for the lack of anything proper private, should be completely out of the option.

But to be fair, you should think multicloud. Yep — combining multiple clouds and their capabilities in true hybrid connected cloud. I know that that requires skills and time and effort and … well then don’t do it. But for now, given that I work for one of them, I will use Microsoft platforms to describe what could be achieved.

Hybrid Cloud Platform is excellent choice for future Government Shared Services providers, given the existence of the Public Cloud (Microsoft Azure), additional Public Cloud Software as a Services (like Microsoft Office 365), combined with the hybrid bridge that connect public and private world (Microsoft Azure Stack and Azure Stack HCI) and on-premise delivered National Datacenters or Provider Datacenters that are usually built on Microsoft Datacenter Server infrastructure (or anything other hyperconverged).

Hybrid platform that would integrate public platforms described above, and creating a microservices based Shared Services model has some unique capabilities:

1. Economies of Scale: any cloud based solution or services have a primary benefit economies of scale: significant number of aggregated resources drive the total cost of usage down, which is true for infrastructure services (Infrastructure as a Services), platform services (Platform as a Service) and software or solution services (Software as a Services), all of them powered by the Microsoft Cloud Platform (Microsoft Azure and other cloud services like Microsoft Office 365).

2. Increased Services Availability and Efficiency: building a service on the on-premise only infrastructure is not only complex, but also very cost inefficient when it comes to efficiency vs. cost comparison. To achieve strong availability, measured in the percentage uptime (like 99,995%) services provider needs to invest significantly — with hybrid model, some of the services can be provisioned from the public cloud where cost of those services is relatively low, comparing to availability and efficiency. Microsoft Public Cloud, which is powering specific services integrated into the Shared Services have an uptime that achieves 99,975% availability.

3. Strong Cost Control: enabling Shared Services model drive strong cost control where we associate a cost with the specific resource (public cloud — Microsoft Azure or/and private cloud — Microsoft based Datacenter, for example). Dynamic resources management give us ability to combine and scale those resources as needed but also mixing resources to achieve desired cost control. Any if you by multicloud mean also hybrid, hosted, local providers, then you have multiple options for sure.

4. High Quality Services: integrating public cloud services into the Shared Services model require that public services have a high quality in the terms of product features, usability and availability. Given that most of those services are not only Government specific, they are already proved on the market — high quality of services will be transponded into the Government services (for example email services based on Microsoft Office 365)

5. Lowering Redundancy: consolidating services to the Shared Services center also means consolidating services from other providers (some of them are providing multiple, same services) and thus eliminating a redundancy in services (for example, different email systems from different providers). Also, we are eliminating redundancy in software, data, processes, infrastructure etc. But at the same time it actually gives you a “Better Redundancy” — for the redundancy sake, where you add a layer of redundancy in the public cloud.

6. Enabling Standardization: using de-facto industry standard software and solutions for end-customers, based on Shared Services (like Microsoft Office or Microsoft Dynamics) enable better control, efficiency and usability. Standardization then drive easier maintenance of the system and provide better user experience for end user customers.

Comparing the Microsoft Cloud Services to other providers shows that there are no many cloud providers that have this breadth of services and platforms on top of which you can build Shared Services for the Government. Some of them have comparable features in infrastructure (like Amazon Web Services) other have comparable features on specific platform services (like Google GCloud) or specific products or services, but none of the competitors have all three groups of services equally in their portfolio. But of course, it depends on you need and workload and scenarios etc.

Specifically, Microsoft is the only provider among those that have Public, Private and Hybrid platforms so that standardization and integration is efficient and available. You know that some others (like Amazon and Google) already decided to add hybrid capabilities (proving Microsoft right) — but that is either infrastructure based (Amazon) or platform based (Google).

Anyway, as I noted, it is customer choice.

image: typical Government architecture that supports Shared Services and MultiCloud approach

You should think scale, orchestration, automation, containerization, dockerization, microservices etc. — that is the future platform that will dominate the world.

During the day, Ratko works in the Microsoft Corporation as a Public Sector Cloud Services Director. During the night, same thing, but he also finds some time to do other things, most of them sounds like fun. Well, at least to us, 40+ years old people from the sixties.