Moving to the Cloud: The benefits to local government in adopting cloud solutions

"Cloud Computing, the practice of using a network of remote servers hosted on the Internet to store, manage, and process data, rather than a server or a personal computer,"

Local council amalgamations are clearly on the agenda and those who are prepared will be better positioned for the changes that occur. Councils must pool your resources together and integrate business processes while continuing to provide uninterrupted services to the local community.

Premier Mike Baird says local government must reform in order to improve service delivery.

“We need to make them sustainable, we need to make them stronger and we need to give them greater capacity to act strategically and engage a whole level of local government,” Premier Baird said.

Meanwhile Minister for Local Government Paul Toole says the reform will prepare New South Wales to be fit for the future, ““We want to ensure that we have a smarter, modern system of local government here in New South Wales,” he said on ABC News.

As a result, you need to prepare and plan for a strategic approach to cloud integration and take into consideration some of these questions such as; how would an integrated IT system work within amalgamated councils? How will the issues of information management and data security be managed? How would councils consolidate the data and systems?

While the benefits of the cloud are well established, local government have traditionally been slow adopters of the next phase of data storage. An article in The Australian from March 2012 stated the main obstacle to local government moving to the cloud was perceived challenges of making the shift from existing subterranean infrastructure, to having one central point of access for all the council's data.

"We want to ensure that we have a smarter, modern system of local government here in New South Wales"

For local councils, funding availability for large-scale infrastructure changes can be difficult with the expectation council's IT teams need to do more with either the same or less funding. The move to cloud computing is a cost which needs to be viewed with the long-term benefits outweighing the upfront costs.

After a sell out debut in 2015, and much demand, Akolade brings together some of Australia's best Cloud adopters from local government for a 2 day conference in Sydney, this July. Akolade's 2nd Annual Cloud for Local Government event is on sale now. To book your place, or to examine the leading-edge sessions available, please click here.

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