Many public sector organisations will soon need to reassess their digital infrastructure capabilities, according to the Society for Innovation, Technology and Modernisation (Socitm).
It has highlighted the issue in the technical trends section of its new Public Sector Digital Trends report, which says existing infrastructure and cloud based services are coming under increasing pressure to cope with the increasing volumes of data and demands for flexibility and resilience in connected places.
The emergence of connected places involves the transfer of data from a myriad of internet of things devices – such as sensors for traffic movements, air quality and pedestrian footfall – along with the need for real time monitoring and, in some cases, automated responses.
This is placing new pressures on digital infrastructure, several of which are highlighted by Socitm. They include: the need for interoperability between increasing numbers of systems; the management of a complex patchwork of datasets; the need for simplified and flexible yet secure access to systems; and the capacity to manage cloud services, which are the only option from many suppliers.
The report says that digital leaders need to ensure they have some control over hybrid and shadow IT, which can create huge hidden costs, risks and inflexibilities. This is likely to involve strong internal policies that control the choice of solutions used.
Optimisation possibilities
It points out that new technologies are available to optimise digital infrastructure, citing the example of MPLS (multiprotocol label switching networks), but that all this comes with the need to find sufficient funds for investment when public sector budgets are severely strained.
“Organisations must ensure that they have a proper grip on IT infrastructure planning and management, not just relying on the marketplace to deliver whatever is necessary to support their commissioned service offerings,” the report says.
“Local public services need to work together to ensure resilient, secure and ubiquitous access to sufficient infrastructure capability and capacity to support digitally connected places, working across cultural, administrative, organisational and structural borders.
“In some countries and in many cities, this is already well advanced. But in other places and in many rural areas, the focus on urban development (and technologies such as 5G and 6G) has left many rural communities behind.”
The report says there is a need for local public services to work together on resilient and secure access. Socitm associate director Mark Brett said that passwords alone are not sufficient and that in most case and multi-factor authentication (MFA) is needed, through mechanisms like facial recognition, proximity recognition and additional authentication apps.
He also pointed to the role of digital certificates in enforcing secure connections to virtual private networks, and described the increasingly complex dynamic in maintaining security.
Sophisticated protection
"As attackers get more sophisticated and organisations networks become more distributed and integrated across multiple external cloud services talking to each other, more sophisticated protection regimes are required," he said.
"AI can help with the real time monitoring of these integrated systems, where the AI knows what 'normal' looks like, through tuning over time. Empowering AI systems to disconnect, devices or whole chunks of a system or service at machine speed, will see protections improve over time.
"AI does require huge amounts of computing power and resources to run these types of protection at a time when finances are getting tighter."
