Why cloud migration is accelerating across the public sector
6 minute read
Jamie Shand
August 10th, 2026
Public sector organisations are moving to Azure because legacy infrastructure costs more to run, carries more security risk, and can’t support modern services. The drivers differ by sector, but the direction is the same.
What’s pushing public sector organisations to migrate now? Three pressures show up on nearly every planning call we have.
- Legacy infrastructure costs more to run each year, and vendors keep withdrawing support for older systems
- Security risk keeps rising, and older estates are harder to patch and harder to prove compliant
- Skills gaps are widening, so in-house teams struggle to run both cloud and on-premises setups at once. None of this is new. What’s changed is the size of the gap between organisations that have modernised and those still waiting
What’s driving change in each sector? Each sector has its own trigger point, even when the underlying pressure is the same.
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What does good cloud modernisation look like?
Getting to Azure is one step. Using it well is another. Many organisations land in Azure through a straight lift-and-shift, moving what they had on-premises with little change. That gets you lower hardware costs and a smaller physical footprint. It rarely gets you more than that. Real modernisation means cloud-native architecture, automated security policy, and infrastructure that scales with demand. The gap between the two is where most of the available value sits.
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FAQs
Migration moves existing workloads to the cloud. Modernisation redesigns them to use cloud-native features such as automation, elastic scaling and built-in security.
It depends on the size of the estate, but most public sector migrations run over several months, from assessment through to go-live.
A free review of your current estate, cloud readiness and likely blockers, carried out before you commit to a migration plan.
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About the author
Jamie Shand, Cloud Platform Solution Lead
Jamie is the Azure Solutions Lead in the Cloud and AI Solutions Team. With 13 years in the industry, including a 3 year stint at Microsoft, Jamie has cultivated a nuanced understanding of technology’s intricacies. At the core, Jamie is driven by a modest yet profound passion for aiding others, utilising the transformative potential of the cloud. Jamie exemplifies a genuine commitment to leveraging technology for the betterment of people, reflecting a quiet force in the evolving landscape of cloud and AI solutions.