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ICT Cloud and the Public Service

At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, the depart- Cloud challenges
ment was ready to support the remote working re- Going cloud had not been without challenges of its
quirements of staff and stakeholders using cloud-sup- own. Typically, DCOG’s initial high capital expenditure
ported Exchange Online, Teams and OneDrive. in the first two years yielded low returns on invest-
ment. This investment was further compounded by
SITA’s infrastructure-as-a-service had been instru- high data centre maintenance, even for services with-
mental in hosting the Community Works Programme out high availability. The cloud adoption might have
(CWP) Management Information System. The CWP eased DCOG’s workload, but internal capacity chal-
information system management is a critical depart- lenges persist, albeit in different forms.
ment service responsible for paying about 250 000
unemployed or under-employed citizens. Conclusion
Adopting cloud ecosystems holds a lot of challenges
The Microsoft hosting platform, Azure, is being used and risks that need to be considered and carefully
to host the District Delivery Model Information Man- planned for and managed not only for DCOG, but
agement System which is a data management solu- also for the Public Service as a whole. However, en-
tion that is being developed to improve the coher- rolment in the hybrid cloud is the only way to ensure
ence and impact of government service delivery to the inevitable transition from traditional IT systems
local, district and metropolitan municipalities by all into digital transformation.
spheres of government. Furthermore, Microsoft Dy-
namics365 is planned for the management of fixed By Inban Moodley
assets and inventories of 6 600 sites under the CWP Chief Information Officer, DCOG
Programme.

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