Three Top Cloud Opportunities in the SLED Market

By Rachel Eckert, SLED Market Intelligence Manager

As I discussed in my recent session at the Arrow Technology Summit (now available on-demand), state and local governments are slowly making investments to upgrade and update aging legacy IT systems. As they do, they are presented with opportunities to increase their use of the cloud to provide digital and online services that will expand their constituent support — an especially important goal as many government buildings are currently closed.

While state governments are making larger and more substantial migrations to cloud services, many states are still working on what I’ll call the basics, things like email or other collaboration tools. Also topping the list are disaster recovery and office productivity tools. States that had already migrated these solutions to the cloud have had a significant advantage in terms of their preparedness to support a large-scale work-from-home environment.

The opportunities for cloud sales come from all over the state, local, and education market. Here are just three segments to consider.

(1) Health & Human Services

This segment is being inundated with data from a huge influx of claims. The data increase isn’t only for unemployment insurance systems, but also Medicaid and child welfare systems. For most states, these systems are owned, managed and operated by one agency, even though much of the data housed in these systems is duplicative.

Managing these duplicative legacy systems is costly for states and doesn’t allow them to adequately or easily provide online services. Cloud would offer much-needed storage expansion as well as an avenue to back-end system integration. A hurdle to consider, however is that many of these systems are still housed on mainframes, making migration more complex and expensive.

(2) Education

Here the big story is around support for remote or hybrid learning. Managing the storage needs for a remote learning environment can be daunting and costly for these school districts. Not only that, but K-12 schools are not immune from the challenges that come with legacy infrastructures.

Now that we are into a new school year, school districts have aligned with one learning management system or another to provide their remote learning environment. What they are still struggling with, however, is the security of the systems, as well as the content and student data. Optimizing the applications school districts use on one common cloud platform simplify work for IT managers and add an extra layer of security.

(3) Law Enforcement & Public Safety

The big issue here is the need for real-time data and analysis. Data collected by body cameras and video captured by citizens and other visual sources needs to be organized, tagged and prepared for prosecution or public release.

Storage expansion is key here, but with an added wrinkle of needing to be CJIS-compliant. As interaction between citizens and law enforcement has increased, open data portals are becoming increasingly popular. Technologies that automatically detect PII and other non-releasable data will be key.

Conclusion

As an IT vendor there are some steps you can take with your customers to help encourage their cloud adoption. Educate them on cloud benefits, including increased data sharing opportunities that foster collaboration — which could help deliver solutions faster to citizens.

Work with your customers to find or develop champions for cloud, not just within the IT department, but across relevant agencies, to help encourage collaboration. In doing so, they will have the opportunity to create a cross-functional team that can work together to develop the best approach and implementation strategy for success.

Watch my entire presentation, SLED: Delivering Critical Citizen Services Digitally With Cloud Services, from Arrow Technology Summit.

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