In today’s rapidly evolving technological landscape, cloud computing, data proliferation, digital transformation, and the advent of generative AI are driving unprecedented change. This wave of ‘positive disruption’ is opening new opportunities. However, it’s also highlighting the need for robust IT investments, stringent data management and security measures across all sectors.
The public sector, in particular, is experiencing significant impacts from this disruption. Public sector leaders face numerous challenges, such as building public trust, increasing productivity while optimizing costs, enhancing customer experiences, and maintaining high standards of security, privacy and compliance.
This is why working with trusted IT partners, such as Ergo, an Azure Expert MSP, needs to form a core part of IT strategies. In this blog post, we will explore how Azure cloud services can help public sector entities meet their needs.
Optimising Infrastructure with Azure
For the public sector, secure, accessible, and compliant architectures are essential for innovation and improved community services. Microsoft Azure offers a multi-tenant cloud services platform that provides the scale and economic benefits of cloud computing while ensuring data and application isolation through logical segregation.
Azure’s public cloud capabilities deliver rapid feature growth, resilience, and cost-effective operations, meeting the needs of various data classifications, including unclassified and classified data. As a public cloud solution, Azure offer resilience during natural disasters, providing failover redundancy.
However, public cloud alone may not always be the best option. By adopting a hybrid and multi-cloud framework, public entities can achieve a balance of cost-efficiency, performance, security, and scalability. This approach leverages diverse cloud services and on-premises legacy systems, ensuring data is accessible and secure. For instance, Azure Local extends Azure capabilities to on-premises, edge locations, and other clouds, enabling hybrid applications. Ergo is uniquely positioned to provide hybrid services, ensuring the infrastructure always matches the need.
Ensuring Data Sovereignty for Public Sector
Public sector bodies often require assurances that their data remains within geographic boundaries of the European Economic Area (EEA), in compliance with regulatory requirements . Data sovereignty involves data residency and introduces rules defining control over customer data stored in the cloud. Microsoft Azure, combined with Azure Local allows public sector entities to meet data sovereignty requirements, ensuring control over data storage, processing, transmission, and remote access. Azure’s comprehensive compliance offerings and robust security measures help public sector entities maintain control over their data, meeting the stringent data sovereignty requirements set forth by EU regulations.
Enhancing Data Security
The shared responsibility model in cloud computing means that as workloads migrate to the cloud, a cloud provider assumes more responsibility for the underlying infrastructure, while customers manage their applications and data. It means that Azure’s mature security and privacy incident management process ensures platform security, while customers are responsible for monitoring their own resources. Microsoft commits to notifying customers of any data breaches within 72 hours of incident declaration.
Shared responsibility model (Source: Microsoft)
To further strengthen cybersecurity posture of their cloud resources, organisations can adopt Microsoft Defender for Cloud. It allows to monitor potential threats across cloud environments and timely respond to incidents. For organisations that lack resources to manage their security operations centre, Ergo provides its MDR service. It leverages the power of Microsoft Security Suite to provide customers with 24/7 monitoring, analysis, and response to security incidents.
Accessing Azure AI Services
Cloud environments offer advanced features like artificial intelligence and machine learning, helping government increase efficiency and gain insights. For example, AI services, such as Azure AI, can enhance citizen engagement through chatbots and data analysis.
Using AI-powered data analysis for better citizen engagement is only part of the story. The other is about transforming routine internal processes with automation and assist public officials in managing large data sets. For example, with AI-empowered chatbots, employees can ask questions in natural language to find information across their organisation more quickly, which free up people to work on more innovative tasks.
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Ergo, an indigenous Irish IT vendor with a 30-year history of partnering with the public sector, understands the challenges state bodies face in redefining governance and public service delivery through digital transformation. Ergo is on the OGP Compute and Storage and G-cloud frameworks. Our compliant and reliable procurement process ensures seamless engagement, enabling customers to achieve strategic outcomes through collaboration and shared ownership of the digital transformation journey.
Talk to us about your requirements
If you’d like to learn more about Ergo’s Public Sector Centre of Excellence and our cloud services, please contact us.
