Where Is Government When It Comes to Cloud in 2025?

“Governments across the globe continue to rapidly adopt cloud to increase digital capacity, be more responsive, and meet stakeholder expectations. Even in developing economies, the public sector recognizes cloud’s potential to optimize service delivery and achieve mission-based outcomes.”

This is how a recent 12-page report, The State of Cloud in Government, 2025, from Forrester begins. (Note: You must be a subscriber or pay to read the full report.)

I am highlighting the report's results now (with permission from Forrester) because I found the findings intriguing and the insights helpful, especially when the global cloud trends are considered. Most states moved to “cloud first” policies a few years ago, so it is important to circle back and see how implementations are being managed in practice.

KEY FINDINGS

Key research findings in terms of public-sector cloud adoption include the following:

• 80 percent of public cloud decision-makers at government organizations use hybrid cloud, while 71 percent use multiple public clouds. 
• Cloud usage in the government is extending beyond cloud-first strategies for new applications to migration of existing workloads. In fact, 27 percent of cloud decision-makers surveyed cited migrating existing workloads as their most likely initiative for the next 12 months. 
• Improving security is still one of the most important factors in government decisions to adopt public cloud (34 percent). 
• 29 percent of cloud decision-makers in government organizations indicate that modernizing core applications is among their most likely initiatives for the next 12 months. 
• 55 percent of government cloud decision-makers indicate that their organization has adopted distributed cloud-native databases in their stacks, which is a sign of broader adoption across the cloud-native ecosystem. 

DIGGING DEEPER INTO THE REPORT

Here are some of the other major insights that are described in more detail in the full report.

• Public-sector organizations are still committed to the cloud and its efficiencies. Government leaders take multiple paths to adopting cloud. While some governments are following the private sector in prioritizing public cloud, it’s not the only game in town: 36 percent of cloud decision-makers at government organizations adopting cloud indicated that their organization used an internal private cloud as their primary cloud computing platform.
• Migration of existing workloads brings new scale to public cloud usage.
• Public-sector organizations value scale and capacity but prioritize security. Improving security is still one of the most important factors in government decisions to adopt public cloud (see Figure 2 from the Forrester report).
• Modernization brings top government cloud initiatives. Striving for digital reinvention and retirement of technical debt, government organizations look to modern platforms like cloud to renew core applications to meet modern requirements.

• Cloud-native practices pick up steam as governments elevate cloud maturity.
• Governments value third-party support for cloud-native development and operations. Global systems integrators and managed service providers play a key role in government cloud initiatives. These partners help fill critical skill gaps with education and training programs and provide managed services in support of governance and operations. Some partners work with leadership to help develop cloud strategies, while others are closer to the implementation and solutioning to help with cloud-native development.
• The unique needs of nation-states drive the creation of public-sector industry clouds. Some cloud service providers actively sell governments access to clouds purpose built for unique needs relating to regulations and portability driven by public scrutiny. Microsoft’s Azure for US Government and Microsoft Cloud for Sovereignty cater to data residency, sovereign controls and other government-friendly solutions. AWS and Oracle similarly offer cloud regions that adhere to U.S. regulations. Google Cloud offers an alternative approach by certifying components of its public cloud for government use, which maintains user experiences across commercial and public-sector verticals. China views government clouds as a strategic national goal that facilitates horizontal collaboration, improves citizen services, and enhances social governance. Chinese government cloud adoption spans all major levels of government, including districts, cities, provinces, and the central government.

FEDERAL CLOUD PERSPECTIVES

The following Fed Gov Today video describes “Cloud, Cyber & AI: Accelerating Federal IT Transformation” with, among others, Richard Crowe from Booz Allen.

Crowe’s interview starts by pointing out that the federal government is a decade into the cloud adoption across multiple administrations, and trends are becoming clearer.

OTHER STATE TRENDS

For those who want to learn more about how adopting public, private and hybrid clouds can be a transforming opportunity for enterprises, this video from CloudWorld 2024 can help:

FINAL THOUGHTS

This journey to cloud adoption started for me more than 15 years ago when I was the Michigan chief technology officer. I find it interesting to go back and see the progress made and which issues have still never been fully addressed. Here are a few examples of blogs to help that perspective:

2010: How Safe Is Cloud Computing?
2017: 7 Tips for Securely Moving Data to the Cloud
2020: State CIOs Lead Digital Transformation During the Pandemic
 
Note that many of the more recent articles on related cloud topics often use terms like "digital transformation" to describe data migrations to and from various cloud computing environments (public, private, hybrid, etc.).