That’s what Gartner’s Andrea Di Maiofound in his recent report: “Government in the Cloud: Much More Than Computing“.

This might surprise initially – after all Forrester just told us that public sector was lagging in the cloud computing adoption rush. However, Andrea builds up a pretty impressive case of why cloud trend is inevitable for governments.

There are a few factors which when considered together make the cloud happening:

• Overall commoditization of government services and ever blurring boundaries between government, NGOs, public, etc.
• Commoditization of IT services: the trend from custom applications, to packaged applications, to central/shared SaaS-style apps,
• Internal budget constraints,
• Public technology (such as YouTube) often being simply the easiest and most effective way to reach out to citizens.

This does not mean that governments are rushing to move all their applications to Amazon. However, there is a trend to:

• Use existing public social media platforms,
• Centralize services across agencies (effectively building some kind of private clouds),
• Use public horizontal services (HR, messaging, collaboration) where privacy, security, compliance and other concerns can be mitigated.

Andrea’s report provides details on these trends and looks at their manifestations across:

• System and Application Infrastructure
• Public Data
• Constituent Data
• Applications
• Business Processes
• Constituent-Facing Services
• Channels

Read/buy the report here.

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