Governments must adopt the right cloud migration strategy

Government departments pursuing digital transformation through cloud adoption must find the right cloud migration strategy, according to SNP Australia Managing Director Brent Paterson.

As more agencies seek to migrate their Enterprise Planning Systems to the SAP S/4HANA platform, choosing the most appropriate migration approach becomes critical, he said.

“Identifying the most suitable cloud migration approach for government departments to take as they transition to SAP S/4HANA is a critical success factor. Making the transition will provide government departments with more support to harness the opportunities of digitalisation; however, systems and data must be moved efficiently and securely before this happens,” Paterson said.

“The choice of a migration path can have a significant impact on the success of a transformation project, including the time it takes to implement. Government departments especially require highly reliable planning in terms of digital transformation and have previously relied on the two traditional approaches of either integrating new implementations or transforming existing systems.”

According to ABS data, in FY20 more than 55% of organisations were using paid cloud services. Adoption has accelerated due to the COVID-19 pandemic — as of June last year, 51% of public sector employees were working from home, Roy Morgan research shows.

Paterson said it is critical that public sector organisations leverage a more flexible approach to cloud migration.

“[Such an approach] provides government departments with considerable advantages in terms of their cloud migration, with none of the downsides,” he said.

“The right approach means minimal risk and disruption throughout the project to completion. Most importantly, more flexible approaches let government departments access and migrate the most relevant historical data in the upgraded S/4HANA system while simultaneously archiving remaining data thus dramatically reducing the production systems database size.”

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