Opportunities for cloud-based solutions in the public sector - during and after the COVID-19 crisis

The public sector can emerge stronger from the crisis if the current pressure to act to provide new solutions for employees and customers is seen as an opportunity. Now is the time to lay the foundation for long-term use of cloud-based solutions.

The COVID-19 pandemic is above all a humanitarian and medical crisis that presents our society with challenges of unimaginable proportions. In order to overcome these and numerous other challenges in the public sector, employees need high-performance, stable and secure IT - sometimes even from home.

But the IT infrastructure of many authorities is overloaded with the short-term provision of solutions for mobile work and (video) telephony from the home office. Sufficient scaling of the existing infrastructure is only possible slowly and with great effort. In March, there were only one in ten employees in the Berlin administration that had technical options. Capacities are scaled with high priority - but this only covers part of the skyrocketing demand.

Decision-makers should react now in order to meet the increased need for technology for working from home and the processing of additional issues at short notice. Central questions are:

• What short- and long-term benefits could cloud-based solutions offer in the public sector?

• How can reservations regarding data protection and IT security be countered in the cloud?

• How can cloud-based solutions be introduced or tested as quickly and smoothly as possible?

Authors: Kerstin Balka and Willem Jansen