John O’Mahony, Deloitte Access Economics Partner, shared some insights from the firm’s latest research, The Cloud Imperative – The unmissable opportunity for Asia Pacific. Key findings show that organisations’ uptake of cloud services is at an all-time high. This surge in digital technology adoption was triggered by the pandemic, and society’s need to respond to it. Customers, individuals, citizens – all are confidently using ecommerce services and able to work and interact remotely – assisted by the cloud.

“Our economic modelling suggests we can achieve a A$15 billion lift in Australia’s GDP by increasing productivity associated with the cloud by 2024,” explained John. And cloud benefits aren’t just limited to improved productivity. Cloud also offers organisations speed and agility, which are increasingly important to respond to constant change and disruption like COVID-19.

For governments in particular, our research shows that the main reasons for engaging in cloud transformation is to enable better ways of working, including consolidating data across multiple government departments, sharing information and enhancing team collaboration. All, no doubt, to make better decisions which will improve the way services are provided to citizens.

For government in particular, there are a number of emerging challenges, both new and familiar:

Doing more with less: notwithstanding the current fiscal environment when purse string have been loosened during the pandemic, we know the government wants to halve the budget deficit in three years’ time, which could affect ICT spend

Being more resilient and responsive to change: there is less time to respond to emerging challenges – droughts, floods, bushfires, COVID – and people expect a faster response

Enhancing citizen experience and trust: this is an important, longer term change and affects Federal and State governments. For example, about 10 years ago the Roads and Traffic Authority was replaced by the Roads and Maritime Services, which has become Services NSW and Transport for NSW. Government is becoming increasingly citizen focused, and the way COVID was handled has seen an increase in citizens’ trust. Getting this right is another way to lift that trust

Climate & sustainability: there’s extra pressure on government to become more sustainable and contribute towards net zero targets

Digital service delivery: we’ve seen a big increase, driven by citizen needs. For example, households and education were disrupted by lockdowns which directly impacted the need for digital alternatives

Changing geopolitical landscape: this is happening across the region and is sign of the times. Technology-enabled warfare, rising cybercrime and virtual wars, changes in defence posture to respond to those threats – these are all shaping our strategic environment.

All of these challenges make for a very complex public sector environment, and cloud is a vital part of the sector’s ability to respond. It can enable better use of resources, improve sustainability, build resilience and overall responsiveness to disruptions, offer a platform for digital citizen services and drive innovation at scale.

Dr Kellie Nuttall, Deloitte Australia Artificial Intelligence Leader, spoke about the historic trends of making operational decisions based on data of things that happened in the past. With cloud, this no longer needs to be the case. Data can be ingested and looked at in real time – turning decision making on its head.

Australian government agencies are leading the way with digital twin replicas of physical environments to optimise decision making. This means that in the case of networked assets – like Victoria’s transport network, for example – digital twins can take vast amounts of data from very granular and diverse sources to simulate different scenarios to show the impact of decisions on the entire network, such as delays or congestion. And where is all of this data hosted?  In the cloud, of course! New technology like artificial intelligence can be efficiently enabled by the cloud, making for a very powerful combination that can transform both government services and entire industries.