Capitalizing on Canada’s cloud momentum requires bold leadership and digital modernization

TORONTO, December 6, 2022 – Despite public service organizations at all levels of government being thrust into the cloud during the COVID-19 pandemic, a new report released by Deloitte Canada finds barriers continue to stall uptake of cloud adoption, leaving Canada lagging behind other developed jurisdictions.

The report, Capitalizing on government's cloud momentum: How to accelerate mission-critical outcomes in the Canadian public sector, is the result of in-depth interviews and workshops with federal, provincial, and municipal technology leaders from across Canada, as well as with leaders from Google Cloud, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft, Salesforce, and DXC Technology. It also leverages insights from Deloitte’s 2021 Canadian cloud adoption research, which surveyed more than 50 government cloud decision makers.

Among its findings, the report shows clear barriers across four key areas: access to talent, financial management, security, and organizational alignment. The findings also note ‘effective leadership’ as a challenge across every sector. Some of the more alarming findings include:

• The top barriers to cloud adoption within the public sector include challenges to hiring and a lack of cloud competencies
  • 60 per cent of 2021 survey respondents either agree or strongly agree that not being able to find cloud talent is a key barrier to getting there
• Public sector leaders identify cybersecurity as the top driver for a move to the cloud, and yet, more than half of public sector leaders (56%) characterize it as challenging or very challenging to convince decision-makers that the cloud is secure
• Many respondents lament the complexity of articulating the cloud’s return on investment (ROI) relative to on-premises solutions with leadership
  • IT leaders struggle to secure even incremental resources to support modernization for an environment that may appear largely viable to leaders with limited background in digital operations
  • Comparing total spend on cloud as a simple benchmark, the US by comparison is outspending Canada by 3x on a per capita basis

The report strongly recommends that government continue to invest boldly in cloud technology. It argues that the adoption of cloud technology has the power to drive better experiences and services to people, and in turn build a more thriving Canada.

“It’s not about technology, it’s about improving the access to and quality of government services for Canadians,” says Jaime Boyd, Partner and National Digital Government Leader for Deloitte Canada. “The COVID-19 pandemic temporarily lifted many of the institutional and systemic barriers slowing down cloud adoption and helped demonstrate what’s possible. It can still be possible again if we have bold, transformative leadership that faces these challenges head on.”

To access innovation, the report suggests that governments should assess what worked from their digital investments fueled by the pandemic and continue to invest in and prioritize the cloud at a pace that matches if not exceeds industry projections. As the Canadian cloud market is forecasted to grow to $569M by 2026, analysts expect this trend to hold into the future, with government cloud spending having a 5-year Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 19.2 per cent.

The full report, including specific recommendations to address systemic barriers to cloud adoption, can be found here.