With rapid technological advances, cities can now transform into smart cities with enhanced and interactive citizen services, better living, and increased economic growth. You can learn more about these opportunities by watching our on-demand webinar, The Benefits of Moving to the Cloud for State and Local Governments. Despite the many benefits, government agencies can find it difficult to gain support for a transition to modern technologies.

In the past, evolving existing systems or creating new experiences was costly and relied on stretching an already-pressured budget. State and local government agencies now want access to new opportunities like Internet of Things (IoT) devices that drive weather sensors, smart buildings, parking meters, and optimized emergency services. Agencies need smart services to transform citizen interactions and use real-time analytics to gain further insights from key data.

But how? Today, traditional datacenters and legacy applications are holding many agencies back from implementing technology-enabled innovation. Digital transformation through cloud technology enables state and local government agencies to rapidly modernize their systems, taking advantage of infinite resources while ensuring the best use of time and budget. Agencies can achieve better citizen services while driving stronger governance, compliance, and accountability. Technology-enabled services can deliver personalized, consistent experiences faster and more cost-effectively than ever before.

Cloud technology is the key enabler of digital transformation by delivering hosted services over the internet to securely build, deploy, and manage apps through a global network of datacenters. Cloud services provide a wide range of dynamic IT offerings to efficiently build anything from simple mobile apps to internet-scale solutions. These services enable new initiatives, empower agencies, increase efficiency, provide faster decision-making, improve citizen satisfaction, and optimize operations.

Reasons for agencies to adopt the cloud include:

• Reduction in infrastructure capital expenditure through elastic and on-demand scale services (pay for what you use), managed by experts.
• Increased security, compliance, and regulation to protect citizens’ critical data and services.
• Ready-to-use initiatives to quickly adopt new methods of app development, IT management, and data protection.
• On-demand flexibility, scalability, and overall accessibility to empower employees and drive efficiency.

Gartner, a research and advisory firm, “foresees double-digit growth in government use of public cloud services, with spending forecast to grow on average of 17.1% per year through 2021.” *

With approximately 86,000 local government agencies in the US now spending over 20 percent of their IT budget on cloud services, now is the time to look to cloud technology to drive digital transformation.

Knowing this, agencies face a critical choice: Which cloud solution is best suited to meet their needs? With its integrated, flexible, and trustworthy approach, Microsoft Azure Government is a government-only cloud you can trust, exclusively for US federal, state, local, and tribal agencies and their partners. Offering the most certifications of any cloud provider, it is simply the most compliant cloud service for US government agencies of all sizes.

To learn more about the challenges and opportunities that come with a government cloud solution, view our on-demand webinar, The Benefits of Moving to the Cloud for State and Local Governments.

* Gartner, Smarter with Gartner, Understanding Cloud Adoption in Government, October 10, 2017 https://www.gartner.com/smarterwithgartner/understanding-cloud-adoption-in-government/