Security to be top reason govt agencies move to cloud

Security considerations will replace cost savings and agility as the primary driver for government agencies worldwide to move to the cloud by 2018, Gartner projects.

Public cloud offerings have evolved to offer the scalability, computing power, storage and security needed to enable better digital government platforms, the research firm said.

Government agencies are accordingly increasingly moving to the public cloud, and security is becoming a major motivator, according to Gartner research director Neville Cannon.

“Many cloud service providers, such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft and Google, invest heavily in incorporating higher levels of security into their products to continue building confidence that their data is more secure,” he said.

“Many of these providers can invest more than what most nations could afford, let alone the average government agency.”

But despite increasing confidence in public cloud security, Gartner predicts that nationalism and concerns about data sovereignty will continue to hinder greater adoption due to the belief that data is more secure when maintained within its jurisdiction.

As adoption continues to accelerate, Gartner recommends that public CIOs look to the public cloud for hosting both public and low- to medium-sensitivity data.

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