If the past year has shown us anything, it's that things are changing, and at speeds greater than anyone imagined possible. Businesses had to pivot overnight to not only survive the COVID-19 pandemic, but to continue meeting the needs of customers in order to thrive. 

For example, when Zoom moved to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), the video communication company scaled up its capacity in just nine hours, to help meet the needs of millions of new users. Seven petabytes of data is now transferred through OCI every day. 

However, it's not just businesses that need to continuously provide great service experiences. The UK Government must also move quickly to meet the urgent needs of citizens and staff, even at a time when agencies and departments must do more with less. 

Restrictions on office working have shown us how cloud-based applications can provide secure access to critical data, from anywhere, at any time, and on any device – helping us innovate and operate in new ways.

How the cloud is powering public sector innovation

With more infectious variants of the COVID-19 virus threatening to slow the global recovery, Oxford University recently partnered with Oracle to create a Global Pathogen Analysis System (GPAS). By combining Oxford’s Scalable Pathogen Pipeline Platform (SP3) with the power of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, this system allows governments and medical communities to act on new coronavirus variants faster.

With extensive use of Oracle Cloud’s machine learning capabilities, Oxford has already processed half the world’s SARS-CoV-2 sequences – more than 500,000 in total.  

The largest ever UK public sector cloud project

Another recent transformation project in which Oracle Cloud Infrastructure plays a key role also happens to be the UK public sector’s largest ever cloud migration. By moving internal workloads to the cloud, the Cabinet Office’s Government Shared Services function – with assistance from partner SSCL – ensured that one of the biggest UK Government departments can deliver cost savings and free up resources.  

With less focus needed to manage IT infrastructure, more resources can be channelled towards delivering great front-line services – helping public sector staff meet the rapidly changing needs of citizens, more efficiently in both time and cost. 

Steve Holborow, Deputy Director – Architecture, Government Shared Services, and Archie Gleave, Transformation Programmes Director, SSCL Government, worked together to deliver this monumental cloud migration. They’ll discuss the project in detail at an upcoming webinar, where they’ll explore the benefits that cloud infrastructure can provide government departments and agencies, such as integrated security, scalable performance, increased efficiency, and agile innovation. 

To learn more about this public sector cloud migration, join the webinar by registering here.