New research has revealed nearly half of the top councils across the UK do not have a plan for cloud computing…
A survey from not-for-profit IT provider Eduserv has revealed a lack of strategy for cloud computing at nearly half of the UK’s top local authorities.
The findings were based on a survey carried out by Eduserv, which looked at the UK’s top 100 councils. The research found only 10 per cent of councils have moved to a pure cloud IT model, and 93 per cent kept all but a small amount of data on site.
Furthermore, despite three in four saying they use cloud computing in some form, they admitted they do not have a plan in place for it. Of the 44 per cent of local authorities without a cloud strategy in place only 15 per cent said they were looking to develop a cloud IT policy.
The research also found that 63 per cent of councils have data centres on their premise, while only a third said they have no external data centres.
Andrew Hawkins, public sector director at Eduserv said: “One of the things from the research that we found most concerning is that over a quarter of the councils approached for the survey could not provide a breakdown of where their data was currently held.
“This shows that information management maturity is still relatively low in local government, which needs to be addressed in the move to digital delivery.”
Jos Creese, principal analyst at Eduserv’s local government executive briefing programme, added: “While there is little surprise that only a handful of councils are showing digital maturity in their adoption of cloud services, the fact that such a large number have yet to formalise any sort plan for using cloud IT is of great concern.”
