"Public" Public Cloud
AWS is a public cloud provider, which means it makes services from various categories like compute, storage, network, databases and many more available and accessible over the internet to everybody. It reduces your costs and increases your availability and it comes with many managed services out of the box or available at the AWS marketplace. This also holds true for other providers like Azure. Different kinds of customers from different sectors use the public cloud. I want to look briefly at one of them, the public sector. A sector that fits very well to public cloud providers in my opinion. Let us talk about the public sector in the public cloud or so to say the public public cloud.
The public sector
Public sector in general includes all public institutions, under the control of the government and available for everybody. Examples are schools, authorities or museums. Every time a public institution needs something new, in this case an IT system for example, it has to tender this need. Interested bidders can answer with their offering and the institution decides for the best one from their point of view.
The law against restriction of competition says the institution should not accept the cheapest bid but the most cost-efficient. For this, the institution has to define criteria to evaluate the offerings and these criteria have to be known to the bidders. Criteria can be monetary or not. Monetary criteria are the price, runtime costs or maintenance costs to name some. Non-monetary criteria can be support, usability, deadlines, synergies or a concept for disaster recovery for example.
Public cloud matching the criteria
Let us look at the monetary criteria. Here a public cloud provider can score immediately. Their base principles include cost efficiency. You reduce your upfront costs and increase your variable expense and you only pay for the services you use. AWS offers many managed services where you do not have to care about the infrastructure these services are running on, reducing your maintenance costs. Increasing or decreasing you capacities whenever needed and launching your system with just some clicks and increasing you agility and speed encourage the non-monetary criteria as well as you can totally focus on the institutions needs and not on building your datacenter. Most of the services are not needed 24/7, they are on-demand if the citizen needs something. An ideal use case to use a serverless approach and to pay only when the user makes a request instead of having servers running for literally nothing most of the time.
How about compliance?
Regarding previous aspects, a public cloud provider is totally a go-to option when seeing a public tender. Data protection is important for the public sector too and so it is a top priority for AWS as well. Customers are able to control where and how the content is stored and who has access to it. AWS offers with AWS Artifact a self-service portal to see all compliance-related information including different reports and certifications. There are also more information about the cloud security topics on their cloud security page.
Single Sign-On to make the citizens life easier
To increase the usability and the experience of the user (the citizen so to say) the platforms should use a Single Sign-On (SSO). The user has to log in with only one ID to all these independent public institution sites. It is only an enrichment if one has not to create new accounts repeatedly. The federal states here in Germany have an own online ID for the citizen usable as identity provider and able to wrap information of the person with different security levels. This approach makes it also more profitable for the institution itself and the bidders. If they have not to deal with setting up a signup and login process for the users themselves, they can focus on the platform itself.
Conclusion
This leads me to the conclusion one should definitely consider a public cloud when thinking about public solutions and I know some institutions already going that way, making the public cloud public or to create a “public” public cloud. Of course, I am interested in your thoughts about this topic to discuss this further.
