COVID-19 has caused IT to be viewed more strategically in the organizations in the public sector. This COVID-19-spurred push is especially notable, given that the public sector has struggled with IT modernization efforts.
This has been stated by Nutanix in its third annual Enterprise Cloud Index Report which measures organizations’ plans for adopting private, hybrid and public clouds.
The reports says that though public sector organizations have historically grappled with regulations that deter telework, the pandemic forced them to take necessary steps to securely support a remote workforce.
Nearly half (48%) of global public sector respondents, and 71% of U.S. Federal Government respondents, said their organizations had no employees working remotely one year ago.
However, since the onset of the pandemic, the sector has scaled its number of remote workers, with only 15% and 11% of respondents reporting employing zero remote workers today.
In order to effectively support this growing remote workforce, organizations have begun strategically evaluating their cloud models – with more than three-fourths (82%) of global public sector respondents identifying hybrid cloud as the ideal IT operating model for their organization.
Other key findings of this year’s report include:
- Modernization is dependent on decommissioning legacy architectures: In 2019, 53% of global public sector organizations exclusively ran traditional, non-cloud-enabled datacenters. In 2020, that percentage dropped to 22%. Organizations are choosing to invest in private and public clouds instead, which will be integrated into a cohesively managed hybrid environment. Over the next five years, the public sector expects a 20-percentage-point drop in legacy datacenter installations and a substantial 43-point increase in hybrid cloud deployments.
- Telework remains top-of-mind: 43% of public sector respondents reported a direct increase in their public cloud investments as a direct result of the pandemic – eight points higher than the global average. These moves likely reflect an effort to quickly provide for teleworking employees, as past restrictions made them less capable of providing work-from-home solutions than other industries. Moreover, most entities in this sector are planning to maintain support for telework, with only 4% planning to go back to their pre-pandemic approach.