Visions for the Smarter State and the role digital technologies, cyber security, and services play in unlocking the next wave of transformation in delivering resilient public services.
This article was authored by Sean Price, Public Sector Industry Strategist, EMEA. It focuses on how data can support public sector resilience.
Flex, but don't break
The UK public sector has had a difficult few years. It stepped up to the challenge during COVID and found new ways to deliver services and protect citizens. However, the pressure is still on. Economic clouds will continue to impact public spending and in an era of uncertainty, the public sector will continue to need to protect vulnerable citizens. Overlaying this will be growing demands for the public sector to become more efficient and productive.
We will also continue to see new threats and increased citizen expectations. Cyber security continues to be a concern and we may face a number of unforeseen and unplanned challenges such as geopolitical, environmental or economic risks...
This increased expectation and reliance on government services means that regardless of what services you provide within the public sector, they must be resilient to the same level as commercial standards. How do we achieve a more resilient public sector? By joining up real-time data across your organisation you can create a foundation for insight and action. This leads to a connected view of service risk and alerting across at least the following domains:
- Business operations
- IT operations (observability)
- Security operations
Let's have a look at these in more detail:
Business operations
Data is mission critical - a strategic asset. Forming a line of sight from your strategic plan to the front line; metrics help you understand the delivery of objectives. Unfortunately, organisations are often data-rich and insight poor. Bringing it together and exploiting it is challenging. A real-time view of your people and processes is vital to understand delivery and risk in an ever-changing world.
Observability
Digital transformation has accelerated for many years, but the pandemic has shone a light on how important it is for a recalibrated world. The efficiency of your IT infrastructure and applications is essential, as is ensuring compliance with regulations. In a digital world, an often complicated suite of legacy systems and applications must perform at their best. A failure can impact your critical operational business, saving millions of pounds and perhaps even lives.
Security
A digitised world provides an infinite number of new possibilities to revolutionise service delivery across an organisation. However, it also presents an excellent opportunity for bad actors' to threaten and attack an organisation. Sensitive data can be stolen, fraud can be committed, mobile devices hacked - the list goes on. The consequences of these security breaches can fundamentally damage the reputation and financial standing. The complexity of IT infrastructure, operating systems and rapidly advancing service transformation can lead to significant gaps in posture and, ultimately, a rise in risk. The ability to monitor, investigate and protect your complex and often hybrid IT infrastructure can prevent substantial issues and critical incidents.
Bringing it all together
We believe the resilience and success of public sector organisations rest on the ability to exploit all relevant available data and move from a position of hindsight to foresight ensuring that they are ready to handle demand spikes and provide effective services for citizens. To achieve this resilience needs to go beyond just individual pockets, a list of tools or tables of stored data. It requires organisations to join together their top-down goals and bottom-up imperatives. There is no out-of-the-box solution to solve this growing challenge but the strong partnership between organisational leaders, technical experts and strategic data and analytics vendors is critical. Accelerating the transition towards a truly scalable approach is only possible through the use of consistent and flexible platform services to enable an empowered workforce.
Resilience is critical within the public sector. Let's join up our data, use all our data and be ready for whatever comes next.
This article was authored by Sean Price, Public Sector Industry Strategist, EMEA at Splunk. Please visit his LinkedIn page, to learn more about this author. Splunk makes it possible to use any kind of data for real-world action at machine speed. Register today to get started with your free Splunk trial. End-To-End Data Coverage. To learn more about Splunk, please visit their LinkedIn and Twitter.