Last week Nigel Spencer from The Crown Estate attended the Worldwide Government Solutions Forum hosted by Microsoft in Government, Public Safety, and National Security.

The event provided insights on how the Government and Public Sector can incorporate cloud computing to build towards better and smarter cities, focusing on the need for a very real and innovative change.

Nigel talked about the Windows Azure storage solution ClearPeople has been working on for The Crown Estate, specifically covering the following points:

• What are the best ways you have found to do due diligence in order to sort the hype from the reality of cloud?
• What advice do you have for our audience in writing a good business case for moving to the cloud
• What are the things you need to do and look out for?
• How are you balancing the risks of security and privacy using cloud services, with the need to reduce costs?
• Are procurement practices, culture or risk governance holding back the broader adoption of cloud services? Is it one of these, all three or something else?
• What kind of communication and change strategy have you put in place to ensure system adoption both by internal employees as well as citizens?
• How did you solve accessibility issues and do foresee challenges due to the digital divide?
• How have you been dealing with device proliferation and the shift to mobile / tablet form factors?
• How would you sum up your overall enthusiasm for the Cloud? And why?

For more information on our cloud solutions visit our website: http://www.clearpeople.com/What%20We%20Do/Cloud%20Solutions.aspx 

Microsoft’s review of the Worldwide Government Solutions Forum can be found here: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ukgovernment/archive/2012/04/26/day-two-of-the-worldwide-government-solutions-forum-in-review.aspx