The public sector faces the same barriers to cloud adoption as the private sector. There are security and compliance challenges; there are skills development and legacy spending considerations, as well as how best to procure cloud services. The pandemic, meanwhile, saw a massive wave of cloud adoption the world over, including in South Africa.
A cloud journey will often start with some questions: what are you trying do and what do you hope to achieve? Will there be any cost savings? What kind of cloud services will you be making use of? And what kind of changes will this mean for your operating model?
Brainstorm convened a roundtable in Polokwane to gauge the level of cloud adoption among public sector technology professionals, many of whom said they were struggling with the more prosaic concern of reliable connectivity.
Brainstorm: Where are you on the cloud journey, and what do you hope it will bring you?
Cephrial Rachidi, manager of IT infrastructure, Office of Limpopo Premier, says it’s using Azure for Office 365 and backups.
Surprise Mothiba, who joined the Limpopo Department of Agriculture and Rural Development in February this year, says the department has also been using Office 365 on Azure from about 2020.
The biggest challenge that his department is struggling with is connectivity.
“The journey (to the cloud) has been a bit complicated, and has meant that we’ve had to upgrade our data lines. Nonetheless, cloud services are available. You’re able to access your documents and emails from anywhere.”
Asked if his department has a datacentre, he says they call it a server room, and that this is at the provincial office.
“I’m not sure if we’ve moved our Active Directory to the cloud, but I do know that all the security rules are centralised in the server room.”
Brainstorm: What are your short-term plans over the next year-and-a-half?
Our biggest challenge is resolving the connectivity issue. If we can do that, then we’ll be halfway to resolving most of our problems.
Surprise Mothiba, Limpopo Department of Agriculture and Rural Development
Mothiba says once the connectivity challenge is resolved, it will be halfway to solving most of its problems.
“As a department, we don’t have much control over our WAN. Once we’ve got our connectivity resolved, then we can start on the digital journey and digitise the whole department end-to-end. The digital journey in 2022 is going to be cloud-based. It’s controlled centrally and that’s where the opportunity lies for cloud providers.”
Asked if anyone else has connectivity challenges, many in the room said the problem was ubiquitous in the province.
Business case for cloud
Earlier this year, the Department of Public Service and Administration published a circular providing guidance on how best government departments should go about adopting cloud. The circular said, among other things, that data must be classified according to the minimum information security standards, and that data must always reside within the borders of South Africa. Heads of department must ensure that a cloud readiness assessment is done before moving to the cloud and that a business case be drafted.
Lutendo Thivhafuni, senior manager: Application Development, State Information Technology Agency, says SITA has a hybrid cloud and can also provide cloud services from Azure, Oracle and IBM, Software AG and AWS.
“Everybody knows that the future for storage and computing is in the cloud. There’s not much investment that people will be doing in terms of building and managing datacentres.”
In addition to SaaS, he says SITA also provides disaster-recovery-as-a-service.
Brainstorm: If a public sector entity wants to consume cloud, do they have to present some kind of business case? What happens if they’ve been sweating their servers in their datacentre or server room for five or eight years, and now they’re starting to see some downtime? What should they do? Should they buy more servers?
People say they don’t want to use cloud, but all those people have a Gmail account, and that’s email-as-a-service, so you’re already using the cloud.”
Lutendo Thivhafuni, State Information Technology Agency
Thivhafuni says departments can provision and manage their servers from a SITA datacentre.
“The intention is to move everything into the cloud. A server’s lifespan in roughly five years and what happens in government departments is that they use servers for 12 to 15 years.
“You have challenges in that you’re always needing some form of capital to buy those servers.”
Kugan Soobramani, head: Vodacom Business in Limpopo, says the connectivity coverage that Mothiba is referring to is not Vodacom’s cellphone network coverage, but the fixed line service.
“Surprise has a regional office, six district offices, and about 30 municipal offices. He needs to get all those offices connected on his own internal WAN. Once he gets those connected, he’ll be able to migrate to the cloud. The problem is there’s no procurement arm at this stage. It’s very cumbersome. If he wants to connect 10 offices, he needs to go out to tender, but we’re working with SITA to see how we can facilitate that.
“Moving to the cloud is not easy, but it can be seamless. You can’t go for a big bang approach, you can try hybrid, but you need to have connectivity if you’re going to embark on that journey. The connectivity needs to be robust and stable. You need a carrier grade network to provide these kinds of services. Can you imagine a department that has a thousand employees…migrating all the services to cloud if you don’t have a robust network? You can’t travel to here from Gauteng on a road that’s full of holes.”
Maropeng Segoapa, IT network administrator from the Bela Bela Municipality, says when he arrived there about seven months ago, from the private sector, the municipality had a 10MB line, which needed to be upgraded to 100MB. He says things can sometimes get frustrating in the slow-moving public sector.
“The servers are more than eight years old, so we need to piece things together so that we can work, but we’re trying to move into the cloud.”
Cherlotte Thaba, assistant ICT director from the Limpopo Department of Education, says they were using a 100MB Vodacom line, but it was ‘too slow’.
“We logged a call today; we’re struggling to migrate our users. It’s too slow. When we logged a call, they said we were utilising bandwidth on YouTube; we tried to block YouTube, but it’s still slow. We’ve got over 1 000 users, and some districts are still not connected.”
Bernard Bergstedt, business development manager at Vodacom Business, says the company will look at the utilisation, and then prioritise mission-critical business applications.
“During office hours, we trickle YouTube and Facebook to less than a 1MB. People will get frustrated, and they’ll learn not to use Facebook during office hours. Maybe you can set a rule for lunchtime to give them more bandwidth.”
‘Is my data secure?’
Thivhafuni, from SITA, wants to speak about the security of data in the cloud, and says it sits somewhere, ‘but you don’t know where’.
“People are scared: Is my data secure? Can it be accessed? Can they see my emails or listen to my phone calls if you’ve got PABX in the cloud?”
I’m worried about cloud; we don’t know where our information is going.
Zwannda Ramadwa, Integrated Project Management
He adds that some public sector server administrators are scared of losing their jobs if cloud services are adopted.
“People say they don’t want to use cloud, but all those people have a Gmail account, and that’s email-as-a-service, so you’re already using the cloud. You don’t worry about Gmail.”
Brainstorm: Is anyone using their Gmail account for government business?
Zwannda Ramadwa, CEO, Integrated Project Management, wants to know where the information actually resides when a cloud service is being used.
“Who’s responsible for that information? Is it accessible to everyone out there? When people use their private Gmail account, they trust Gmail. You can’t trust the government email at all. Gmail never goes down. I’m worried about cloud; we don’t know where our information is going. Where is this cloud? Where is this information being kept?”
Brainstorm: “It’s sitting in a datacentre.”
Ramadwa: “Where is this datacentre?
Ridwaan Soomra, Vodacom managing executive for the Limpopo region, says Gmail was one of the first cloud-based email solutions. “We trust Gmail, but we’re not willing to move our own information onto a cloud. I hear about the cost part, (so) is there a prepaid cloud option? Is there a guarantee that if I’m late with payment, you won’t cut my services? The reality is that if we need to get government and country behind these types of solutions that make sense, we need to figure out how to bridge the gap in making people understand where the information is stored and who’s responsible for it.”
* This feature was first published in the September edition of ITWeb's Brainstorm magazine.
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* Article first published on brainstorm.itweb.co.za