Benefits of Cloud

Cloud technologies are essential to realising our digital ambitions for the NHS. Our cloud-first policy means they are the default choice for all services. Cloud services provide the sector with an opportunity to improve public services that is unparalleled since the mainstream introduction of IT. It is important organisations understand the benefits of using cloud services, and how they can enable digital transformation and help you achieve your digital ambitions.

To ensure that teams take advantage of the reduction in delivery times there needs to be an understanding that:

• financial management: team financial management/planning needs to change, being able to build solutions in days doesn't benefit the organisation if it still takes months to sign off the team’s budget
• operational management: a clear model for operations, whether running SRE, DevOps or another structure there needs to be a clear understanding of solution ownership and a service lifecycle. If a team other than the one building a service is operating it, they need to understand how it works and need to have control over when it’s accepted into service and
• non-functional requirements: a team will not continue to deliver rapidly if their time becomes consumed with fixing the existing solution building a set of foundations and clear non-functional requirements that mean solutions do not need constant triage gives teams the time to focus more on delivery

For organisations to take advantage the following behaviour needs to be adopted:

Reuse - the ability to share learnings and tooling internally so the organisation does everything once and benefits from everyone's learning requires a far more collaborative approach than historically most organisations have encouraged.

The arrival of cloud services into mainstream use is a revolution in business capability, not merely an evolution in IT delivery. The constant innovation that characterises the public cloud landscape is having a profound impact on our ability to develop convenient, secure and integrated public services.

To take advantage of the constantly evolving capabilities teams need the following skills or behaviours:

• the understanding that any solution needs to be “designed for today”, tomorrow the provider will likely release a new feature that will reduce the effort the team needs
• an iterative approach, as new capabilities are released existing solutions need to be reviewed to understand whether there is benefit to adopt them and then the ability to prioritise those changes

The use of innovative cloud technologies is critical to the delivery of convenient, secure and integrated public services. 

Current development methodologies lean towards the creation of larger, monolithic services with slow-moving and risk-averse development and release cycles.

Operating in this way prevents organisations from delivering service improvements at a pace their customers expect.

To take advantage of continuous improvement teams need the following skills and behaviours:

• regular interaction with stakeholders to understand what they want to see from the product and why
• flexibility with road-mapping and prioritisation - the ability to change the priorities of what the team works on based on customer need and an understanding that this need changes based on demand
• the ability to deliver minimum viable product (mvp) - request and record feedback and make incremental changes to the feature/product offering in a short space of time
• ensure releases are made at least on a per-sprint basis

The climate emergency is at the forefront of government policy and public awareness. It is critical the Government leads by example and sets the environmental standard for others to follow.

Cloud services can help you meet your environmental objectives and support the Government’s broader environmental goals.

While not specifically a set of skills/behaviours needed to unlock the sustainable elements of public cloud teams need to consider when and how much infrastructure is running to maximise the environmental benefits:

• platform scale up time needs to be understood to ensure that autoscaling can manage demand peaks
• autoscaling groups should be used on any infrastructure the team is running to ensure only required infrastructure is running but also to manage failure in a more graceful manner
• any non-production infrastructure must be stopped when its idle. Ideally this should mean that when it’s needed the team starts it for the specific job and stops it when they’ve finished however this does require a level of maturity and planning to achieve

The meaning of the term Evergreen IT depends on the context. It usually refers to 'a technology ecosystem that is continuously changing and evolving, never becoming out-of-date or obsolete'. 

An example of this is the latest Windows servicing model, in which the operating system is updated frequently, with many smaller releases, rather than a single more significant version every few years.

One of the most significant challenges our organisations face when providing services is how to effectively and efficiently maintain systems and software to ensure they’re up-to-date, secure and leverage the latest features.

To take advantage of these benefits teams need to

• understand the shared responsibility model for the services they are using, these vary between services and affect the amount of involvement or planning the team need to make for updates;
• ensure the team understands where the service is in its lifecycle. While cloud providers rarely remove capabilities from existing deployments, they will remove those capabilities from new accounts. The team should move to the latest version of capabilities when they know it’s stable to avoid getting caught with legacy services they can’t easily recreate and
• design services to use Open APIs aligned to standards wherever possible so that you can manage the implementation of your services in a continuous way without exposing the details and impact to the consumers of those services. In addition, support interoperability across services

Disaster Recovery (DR) refers to the ability of your systems and services to continue operating, or be recovered, in response to a service-affecting outage or event.

Teams need to understand the following to take advantage of the DR capabilities offered by cloud providers:

• understand the availability requirements of their product.
• understand the services the product is dependent on and their DR solutions.
• be aware of the availability offered by the different cloud services and how to take advantage of them (for example in AWS amazon provide 99.9% availability for instances in a single AZ and 99.99% for instances when used in 2 or more AZ)

Public cloud fundamentally changes the approach organisations take to Information technology security. Historically a secure platform would have highly restricted internet access and rely on segregation at a network layer to limit the exposure of internal systems to external threats. Public cloud by its definition is internet connected by default and organisations need to manage security based on this

• the other benefits of cloud come from providing product teams with a level of autonomy. Information security teams need to work with product teams to build secure infrastructure
• build a maturity model and reduce the level of centralisation based on the maturity of teams
• ensure there are dedicated members of the security team able to work in product teams to solve problems together

It is important to remember that you must always be responsible with data and that your services should be secure by design. Cloud services provide world-class security and alleviate the burden of implementing and operating effective security controls, but using the cloud never removes your responsibility to protect data and services.