Digitalization and evolving cloud technology provide businesses and public sector agencies with a responsibility—and an unprecedented opportunity—to empower their users with convenient, accessible, and secure digital tools and services. Canada has embraced this digital transformation, recently landing in the top ten of the World Digital Competitiveness Ranking[i], a measure of a nations’ “…capacity and readiness to adopt and explore digital technologies as a key driver for economic transformation in business, government, and wider society.” And while businesses have led the way—think digital banking, shopping—the public sector has been slower to adapt.
Navigating complexity
Canadian public sector organizations recognize the need for IT modernization; top business drivers include security, affordability, and simplicity[ii]. And while the cloud is a key facilitator of workload migration it isn’t without its challenges—the biggest one? Complexity.
Complexity makes it hard to see where you’re going, where you need to go, and how you’re going to get there. Public sector digital transformation faces complex barriers, including total cost of ownership (it’s hard to justify an investment in digital transformation when you’re facing shrinking budgets), sourcing qualified staff, and accessing industry-leading applications. That kind of complexity is like kryptonite to innovation and growth. The cure? Keep it simple.
Find simplicity
Albert Einstein said, “Out of clutter find simplicity.” Leonardo DaVinci called it “the ultimate sophistication.” For me, simplicity is something that I believe in absolutely—so much so, that I built a company around it.
Dealing with big cloud providers is rarely simple, and in an environment overflowing with information and choices, it’s easy to get lost in the details. And bad things can lurk in unnecessary details: services you don’t need, fees you weren’t expecting, critical regulatory gaps you didn’t know about—all adding up to costly mistakes. Organizations can successfully navigate complexity through careful planning and by leveraging the expertise of a trusted partner: one who chooses simplicity over complexity for the sake of complexity—one that provides resilience, flexibility, affordability and transparent invoicing, a streamlined services catalog, data security and sovereignty—all backed by human support.
Built for what’s now—and what’s next
You’re focussed on a creating a solution for today’s workload, but who’s planning for tomorrow? A year from now? A good cloud solution is one that gives you the capacity, flexibility, and resilience to let you grow, adapt, and innovate to meet your users’ changing needs. I founded ThinkOn on the guiding principle to do just that. Using the IT equivalent of Lego bricks, we develop and deliver modular cloud solutions through our ecosystem of managed service providers, value-added resellers, and system integrators.
No-surprise costing
Sixty per cent of organizations cite cost-savings[iii] as the key driver of IT modernization initiatives, but the sad fact is, many organizations that pursue digital transformation to save money end up spending far more than they anticipated. When budgets are tight, organizations need a cloud provider that keeps billing simple and transparent, with no sneaky fine print, no hidden fees (ingress, egress or otherwise), no escalating cloud allocation use charges, and no cost to push and pull data.
New data, who dis?
Digitalization means managing huge amounts of sensitive data—data that your users trust you to protect. And the fact is, your cloud provider is not responsible for data security, you are. But that doesn’t have to be as complicated as it sounds. The right partner for your workload migration has the technology, expertise, and partner relationships to safeguard your data through its entire life cycle.
Sovereign cloud
Data sovereignty relates to the idea that data is subject to the laws and regulations of the country where it is stored. For example, you’re a Canadian organization, but your cloud provider is American and operating servers all over the world. Your data might have been collected in Canada, but once it leaves Canada, it will be subject to regulations in the countries where it physically resides, regulations that might contradict Canada’s privacy and data security laws. This can get very complicated, very quickly—and in highly regulated industries like healthcare, it’s a privacy nightmare.
You need to know who can access your data, what regulations it might be subject to, and whether it’s compliant. For sensitive data, that calls for sovereign cloud. Wading through international data regulations is the kind of complexity that no one needs, and when Scality recently polled IT decision makers across France, Germany, the U.K., and the U.S., they found that 98% have data sovereignty policies in place or planned, and almost half plan to use hybrid cloud or regional cloud providers as an alternative to the public cloud[iv].
ThinkOn is proud to be Canadian owned and operated, the Canadian VMware SCloud partner, Pro-B certified, and the only CSP capable of offering data sovereignty to the Government of Canada.
Digital Canada
Canadian public sector organizations are increasingly prioritizing digital-first strategies. With a trusted partner, they can plan and create simple, affordable, and comprehensive IT solutions that will give them the flexibility to innovate and grow.
Find out more about what IDC analysts consider the biggest digital transformation challenges for Canada’s public sector here: IDC Analyst Brief.
[i] https://www.theregister.com/2022/09/29/world_digital_competitiveness_ranking/
[iv] https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/data-sovereignty-strategies-embraced-by-98-of-it-decision-makers-in-europe-and-us-according-to-new-research-301622768.html