Local government agencies are facing increased pressure to improve agency agility and performance, while creating efficiencies and reducing costs in order to better serve the public, and cloud solutions could be just the answer. Today marks the kick-off of our thought leadership blog series designed to provide local government leaders around the world with specifics on how cloud solutions can enable citizen services and drive transformation for a more connected, more efficient government.
Throughout the series, our industry experts will examine a variety of topics from the value proposition of cloud to a review of how specific agencies are effectively using cloud to meet department imperatives. Below is an example showing how the regional government of Castilla-La Mancha in Spain is using cloud to increase its ability to quickly provision new projects, realize operating and capital cost savings, and offer new services to its widely dispersed citizens and workforce.
Whether you’re a small or large organization, your employees are no doubt your most valuable assets. During my career, I’ve seen just how critical it is to unlock the full potential of each person to achieve great things. Today’s unique challenge lies in facilitating effective collaboration amongst a globally distributed workforce with the Internet at the center of everything.
I recently took the stage at Cisco Live! London where I talked about a new class of Internet-raised employees, their requirements for the next-gen workspace, and what Cisco is doing to facilitate this new way of working.
For starters, employees’ expectations today far exceed those of the past when it comes to communications. I can’t even imagine how my 7-year old daughter’s generation will be when they enter the workforce. Influenced by their consumer experiences, employees now desire (and need) much more than the corporate issued laptop: They want access to the devices—smartphones, tablets—and platforms of their choosing. IT departments now must figure out how to provide integrated collaboration experiences from any device and location. I’ve dedicated the past few years to finding a way for people to collaborate in a secure and scalable way while meeting these new expectations.
Two weeks ago, we had the pleasure of hosting a TelePresence roundtable for 46 Public Sector CxO-level executives from 20 locations throughout Europe, Middle-East and Africa (see map below). The event was moderated by Jens Mortensen (Director Central Government & Healthcare, Cisco EMEAR) and the main objectives were:
To present and debate on 3 perspectives of Government Cloud Governance: Policy, Insourcing Model, Outsourcing Model
To share best practices and alternative governance models with peers in different countries
To help shape, plan and implement a proven strategy for government cloud
The CTO of a central ICT agency in Europe reported: “I valued the pragmatic approach (presentations from people in the public sector who actually have a service running) and the possibility to ‘network’ with very relevant people for the cloud project [my organization] is working on).”
The CEO of an ICT Provider for Government agencies reported: “I enjoyed the discussion very much. Clearly there are very many different approaches to implementation of domain cloud solutions for both public and private sector needs based on local supply structures and government culture.”
By Biren Mehta, Senior Marketing Manager, SP Marketing in Routing and Switching, Cisco
Today’s business is more distributed and mobile than ever. Whether companies are building new data centers, redistributing existing servers, or outsourcing IT functions to public, private, and hybrid cloud delivery models, the network is at the center and a key control point for cost-effective cloud services delivery model.
Cloud computing is the most network-centric compute paradigm to date. A successful cloud service offering will depend on a network foundation that’s elastic, agile, and compute workload optimized enabling organizations to transition IT assets to the cloud securely, and cost effectively. Read More »
In this week’s episode of Engineers Unplugged, Colin McNamara (Nexus IS, @colinmcnamara) and Joe Onisick (Insieme, @jonisick) take opposing viewpoints for the OpenStack, cage match. Let’s watch:
Welcome to Engineers Unplugged, where technologists talk to each other the way they know best, with a whiteboard. The rules are simple:
Episodes will publish weekly (or as close to it as we can manage)
