Government Solutions: How the Cloud Is Unlocking New Potential for the Public Sector

The cloud is enabling federal, state, and local government agencies to provide vital public services to citizens more efficiently and at lower costs. According to new data released by Gartner, public agencies are now reporting success rates in implementing cloud computing initiatives that approach those of private industry. Let’s explore how legacy solutions are holding back the public sector and how all can benefit from upgrading to cloud-based government solutions. 

Legacy Systems Constrain Government Agencies

Facing modern challenges with legacy systems has left public agencies at all levels of government at a disadvantage. As needs expand and cybersecurity threats increase, it’s more important than ever to migrate to faster, more capable, and more cost-effective solutions. One example is a 2021 U.S. Senate Investigators on Homeland Security report that assigned many large federal government agencies a grade of C- in their efforts to properly secure public information in the systems they maintain. But innovative cloud computing is already in the process of revolutionizing a broad range of government solutions, including cybersecurity, data analysis, and collaboration—in addition to significant reductions in maintenance burdens and overall cost. 

Cloud-Based Government Solutions Empower the Public Sector 

Cloud-based government solutions equip agencies at all levels to execute their core mission more efficiently by taking advantage of modern technology and tools. Here are just a few of the ways government entities are leveraging the cloud to provide essential services to the citizens who depend on them.

Fast, secure data sharing with other agencies and partners

Government agencies hold a wealth of actionable data. But after decades of growth, this data is often scattered across on-premises systems and isolated cloud implementations. This patchwork makes it difficult to access, share, and interpret data in meaningful ways. In contrast, cloud data platforms offer a single source of truth that makes data sharing fast and secure, allowing government agencies to efficiently share data within the agency, and with other government entities, the public, and private partners—without the added burden and complexity of copying or moving data. 

Designed to support concurrent resource use at scale

Government solutions must support large numbers of concurrent users and often require massive amounts of on-demand data storage and processing capacity to operate at optimal efficiency. Cloud-based systems are an ideal fit with near-instant, virtually unlimited scalability. Their dedicated compute resources are designed to adjust automatically or on the fly, providing the capacity required to handle governmental-scale workloads and applications, including data engineering, data lake, data warehousing, data science, data applications, data sharing, and many types of business intelligence and data analytics applications. Using multi-cluster, shared data services eliminates the possibility of resource contention, allowing each user and workload access to the computing horsepower needed for quick and efficient task execution. 

Reduced maintenance burdens

Government investment in IT modernization pays both immediate and long-term returns by significantly reducing the time IT specialists spend maintaining a collection of aging and disparate systems. Standardizing on a unified cloud data platform allows IT staff to shift their focus from managing infrastructure to managing data. This pivot allows government agencies to begin leveraging their data as a strategic resource. With all relevant data easily accessible in a single source of truth, the data can be easily analyzed and shared, unlocking its full potential for the benefit of citizens, related government agencies, and private partners.

More cost effective than legacy systems 

Many governmental data storage and analytics solutions have grown organically over time, resulting in a fragmented, overly complex web of systems that now require significant IT resources to support and maintain them. In contrast, cloud platforms include a fully managed service layer that streamlines tasks such as authenticating user sessions, managing resources, enforcing comprehensive security measures, compiling queries, enabling data governance, and ensuring ACID-compliant transaction integrity. This allows government agencies to redeploy IT staff to projects that provide long-term, strategic value to the agency’s mission. In addition, cloud systems are easily scalable, with pricing based on current storage and computing resource use. 

Easily scalable to support future growth

Government solutions should be built with an eye on the future. By their nature, cloud platforms are designed to scale, quickly adjusting to meet current data storage and computing needs. Their simplicity, power, and flexibility stand in stark contrast to costly and inflexible legacy data solutions with bounded resources that make them difficult and expensive to scale. 

Enhanced data security and compliance

Government agencies generate sensitive data, often with inadequate data security protection, making them vulnerable to cyberattacks and data breaches. Agencies seeking a new partner to power their current and future government solutions can save significant amounts of time and worry by choosing a cloud provider with robust data protection protocols. Hallmarks of industry-leading data security and compliance include data encryption, access control, and a commitment to maintaining robust data storage and physical infrastructure security controls. Many cloud solutions have multiple data security and compliance features built in with extensive monitoring, alerts, and cybersecurity practices. Examples include meeting NIST 800-171 requirements, FedRAMP Ready or Authorized designations, FISMA, and support for HIPAA compliance.

Government Solutions Powered by Snowflake

Improve citizen services and drive innovation and efficiency with the Snowflake Data Cloud. Break down information silos with seamless, secure data sharing capabilities to drive collaboration, and deliver governed, simple, and near real-time data access within a single platform. Snowflake is FedRAMP Authorized (Moderate) on AWS commercial and Azure Government regions, so you have confidence in your data security. 

Snowflake enables government agencies to modernize existing technology infrastructure by transforming data warehousing, data lakes, and data application development infrastructure. Snowflake powers faster, more-informed decisions by enabling comprehensive views of intra- and cross-organizational data, allowing users to quickly and easily use real-time insights to make data-driven decisions. Leverage the cloud to transform citizen experiences by delivering innovative, intuitive, and efficient services using deep insights from comprehensive, secure, and reliable data.

Explore Snowflake’s government solutions that enable virtually any data workload on any cloud with a simple, powerful, and flexible platform.