“ Increasingly we ’ re working directly with end user teams without the involvement of procurement , which suits us all just fine ”
— Martin Wilson ,
Bright
Martin Wilson , director of Bright , the company behind Asset Bank and Dash , is an advocate for lean start-up techniques and agile working . Working with the public sector , he says , has been particularly interesting since Covid-19 came about . For him , the journey is positive .
“ For all sectors the transition to cloud , and SaaS in particular , has been accelerated by the sudden shift to remote working caused by the Covid- 19 pandemic , and the public sector is no exception ,” Wilson says .
“ Suddenly , being able to access software systems from any location – ie home – has become essential . While many of our public sector clients have VPNs in place to access their internal systems , that adds an extra level of complexity that most people working remotely could do without . Organisations that were just starting to think about a move to the cloud before the pandemic have decided to bring forward their plans .
“ When we first started selling Asset Bank 15 years ago , almost all our local government clients wanted the software installed on their own servers . The given reasons were security and perceived cost savings – their IT departments provided the necessary infrastructure , which was often seen as being effectively free to the team procuring the software . This has changed a lot in recent years .
“ Many public sector organisations are now open to cloud-hosting – being more confident in its security and
57 technologymagazine . com