Digital India is one of the most ambitious governmental digital-nation initiatives of its kind in the world today. In the race to transform India into digital empowered society and knowledge economy, the Government has already begun to make strides in its effort to scale the reach of key government services through ambitious cloud computing initiatives like GI Cloud. Yet as departments start to migrate their IT, the conversation must move away from just scale and cost savings to how access to government services – and the productivity of government workers – can be maintained, or indeed improved. While security and cost efficiencies are no doubt critical for the public sector, these savings can be rapidly negated if the impact on user experience, and productivity, is not properly factored into cloud migrations. Logically, when you move your data further away from your users, there is high probability that performance might suffer unless mitigated. It’s no secret that the paper and pen will be largely replaced by the tablet and smartphone. This paradigm shift means every government department, much like the modern enterprise, will depend on applications for almost every task. Therefore, IT is embedded in every business process and must perform. As day-to-day tasks depend ever more on applications performing at their optimum, the evolution from on premise to the cloud means the application network paths are becoming increasingly complex and likely to even more dynamic. If this complexity is not properly managed, seen and optimized, application performance will suffer. If applications don’t work, public servants and citizens can’t work. Application performance issues, particularly in the public sector, impact more than just employee productivity. Increasingly, critical government services will be being delivered online and those who will suffer most will be the citizens, the end-users. This can range from issues filing taxes before deadlines, accessing critical patient data in an emergency, or not being able to update your Aadhaar data because of a network overload. These and other issues have the potential to seriously impact citizens. While the government should be applauded for mandating departments and agencies adopt cloud technology, it is crucial that cost savings aren’t considered in a vacuum. The impact on performance needs to be considered with just as much, if not more, gravity than just the bottom line. So how do you measure – and ensure – end-user experience? There are three critical aspects to ensuring cloud-first adoption does not see productivity being sacrificed for cost savings: visibility, optimization and control. Visibility The ability to see all applications and data moving across networks, regardless if they are on-premise, in the cloud, or a combination of both. Having visibility, not only into your network typography, but also how your applications and data are travelling, as well as identifying any potential blocks, ensures IT teams can stay one step ahead of potential performance degradation. Optimisation Secondly, you need optimisation to take action on the insights gleaned from visibility in order to ensure performance and productivity. Cloud providers with the economies of scale to drive costs down will offer the government the most significant savings – typically if these providers are overseas. Unless you’re able to optimise your network and application performance, moving data across significant distance will decrease productivity. Control Finally, in order to manage the complexities of the new-found cloud environment you need to be able to take control. Different cloud providers specialise in particular applications or services and it is the norm in private enterprise to have multiple providers. This trend will no doubt continue in the government space and while it adds to the labyrinth of IT architecture, it can be managed with the ability to prioritise certain types of traffic over others. With the right tools, predetermined performance thresholds can be set centrally so that critical traffic is given priority over less important information flows, and the appropriate network path is selected. This can even be automated with a ‘set and forget’ series of rules to ensure the applications that mean most to each department remain available. This automation means that any potential application outages can be fixed before end-users even notice a problem. As government services increasingly shift to online delivery – whether through computers, tablets or smartphones – and applications become central to public service operations, it becomes critical that user experience is factored into any implementation. When tax return deadlines loom, services need to be able to cope with the influx of visitors to government websites. Intelligent network and application performance solutions can prioritise these data flows to ensure both public servants and the public aren’t left facing the frustration of crashing websites and never-loading pages – and the good news is that these levels of visibility, optimization and control already exist. By Paul Coates, Vice President, Channels, APAC and Japan, Riverbed Technology Views expressed by the author are personal
