This upward trend in 2024 spending reflects a broader shift back to dedicated environments, with 42% of IT professionals saying they migrated workloads away from the public cloud in the past 12 months.
Local government has historically lagged on cloud adoption, often due to aging infrastructure, complex estates and risk-averse procurement. But the devolution agenda, combined with the trend towards local authority mergers, could shift that dynamic.
"Committing to a single provider on such a timescale introduces unnecessary risk, cost and dependency, precisely when we should be building resilience by diversifying and investing in our sovereign digital capabilities."
Microsoft's warnings highlight the risks of continuing to use unsupported versions of Exchange Server, emphasizing the urgency for IT administrators to begin planning their next steps.
"That made putting ERP-like applications very difficult, because you're starting to go in against the organization's culture. So, 14 years of trying to deploy ERPs is quite hard when you don't get a level of buy-in to global templates."
"The initial phase is to evaluate the existing BW applications, assessing dependencies like shared modules, libraries, adapters, and unsupported components to ensure compatibility with the cloud."
