Public sectors across the world will receive help in harnessing the power of analytics in the cloud through a new strategic partnership between an American analytics software developer and an American multinational technology company is helping the public sector.
The advent of robust analytics and flexible cloud strategies is giving governments the ability and the agility to stand on equal ground with the nimbler private sector — particularly during the disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Director of Global Government Practice at the analytics software developer stated that never before have enterprises adapted and transformed as rapidly as they have since the arrival of COVID-19. In the private sector, these decisions have come relatively easily, even if the execution is hard — meet the customer where they are, expand infrastructure to meet the ballooning digital demand, and enable legions of employees to work remotely.
However, to truly understand the scale of the moment, watch as governments — sometimes perceived as slow to adopt digital transformation — become agile champions of the cloud.
To help governments achieve this, the analytics software developer has formed a strategic partnership with the tech giant to combine and harness the power of the former’s data analytics capabilities and the latter’s flexible Azure cloud environment.
Of course, analytics and cloud are not new concepts, but what’s different is the urgent move away from siloed and legacy infrastructures that are simply not capable of reacting fast enough in the current environment.
The Worldwide Director of Smart Infrastructure at the tech giant has spent the past 15 years helping cities around the world build innovative solutions using cloud-native analytics. He says he can see clearly how the future will be defined by data analytics, particularly with the Internet of Things taking off and the data flood beginning.
For someone to make sense of all that data and see patterns in it is a monumental challenge — let alone making predictions from it. There’s so much potential with the analytics software developer, who has that inherent knowledge of understanding and interpreting data analytics, with the ability to execute on that data.
And of course, when talking about government-held data, compliance and security are at the top of the list of requirements, making the tech giant’s certified Azure solutions all the more important. Azure provides control of the data, and the analytics software developer’s Viya — a data analytics platform designed for Azure — enables analytics across the entire spectrum.
Public-sector analytics in the IoT age
One may not think of a government or city council as having a large IoT estate but think of light poles, luminaires, air quality sensors, water meters and water quality management systems. All of these are connected and generating a huge amount of data.
Keeping on top of these assets and sensors is vitally important for city, state and federal governments, especially those committed to dealing with climate change or other serious challenges such as the COVID-19 pandemic.
Pandemics, the present one or any other, seem tailor-made for analytics solutions. The analytics software developer is using analytics to find anomalies in public health, figure out how to optimise hospital bed usage, and manage a supply chain for personal protective equipment in the wake of COVID-19.
And then there are other fields such as fraud prevention, crime investigation and so on, which also are ideally suited to analytics solutions.
The possibilities of powerful analytics in government are truly exciting, the Director of Global Government Practice stated. The company’s focus now is helping those public institutions embrace the cloud quickly to drive tangible results.
Deep integration
The need to respond quickly to COVID-19 has helped everyone in the sector to realise that digital transformation can happen anywhere, on any timeline.
It doesn’t have to be at the nation-state scale. Local government is equally well suited to capitalising on the benefits of cloud-enabled analytics. Cities don’t have the expertise internally to deploy these tools, so customers are not being asked to invest in huge data centres and spend their precious budget on data capture and data storage.
That service offering is built on the deep integration of the Viya platform with Azure services such as including Azure Kubernetes Services (AKS), the tech giant’s Active Directory, Azure Synapse, enabling the delivery of a fully integrated, end-to-end, cloud-native analytics solution.
Keeping the end in mind
It’s important to remember the ultimate beneficiary of all this technology is — the citizen. Cloud-enabled analytics must be employed in such a way that dealing with government agencies becomes easier and more streamlined. Citizens are expecting a level of performance that they experience in the consumer world, and that performance can now be achieved faster and at a lower cost thanks to partnerships like that between the two software firms.
Governments have an enormous responsibility to keep citizens safer, to reduce unnecessary spending, and frankly, to make daily life more enjoyable. The analytics software developer takes this responsibility seriously and is working on the next generation of analytics technology that will help the public sector reap the benefits of the cloud, and improve the citizen experience.
