Government officials cite security and user experience as top concerns in delivering apps in a cloud setting and pushing out online citizen services. Credit: Thinkstock Government CIOs in states and local districts increasingly are looking to push applications to the cloud, but security and a reliable user experience remain principal challenges, a new survey reports Akamai, which provides a leading online content delivery network, tapped the Center for Digital Government to canvas state and local government IT workers to gauge their technology priorities and concerns, finding that poor user experience is a major obstacle for the spread of e-government services. Government CIOs are struggling to meet rising expectations among consumers for what level of service a website should deliver, and 70 percent of the respondents in Akamai’s survey said that a consistent user experience is an “unmet need.” [ Related: CIO-CFO Collaboration Critical for Advancing Federal IT ] Tom Ruff, Akamai’s public sector vice president, argues that government CIOs can help improve the quality of their agencies’ online services by embracing a more agile, cloud-oriented model for provisioning IT than the public sector has generally employed. “State and local governments need to abandon traditional procurement methods and move instead to a more flexible services-centric approach,” Ruff writes in an email. “They need to look at XaaS, providing delivery of a service over the Internet, to allow for efficiency and economy of scale.” Akamai’s survey comes amid a broad if varied movement toward improving e-government, with officials at the federal, state and local levels working to enhance citizen services and transition their own internal systems and applications to the cloud. Security and user experience top challenges As with their counterparts at the federal level, state and local IT officials say that security and user experience are significant challenges. In the area of citizen services, such as online voter registration or DMV forms, for example, more respondents — 48 percent — named user experience a challenge than any other issue. Asked to identify up to three challenges in delivering online services, 39 percent cited security as a barrier, followed by a lack of personalization (35 percent) and cost or a weak return on investment (33 percent). Security is a far larger concern with the delivery of Web applications in a cloud setting, broadly. Asked to identify all provided choices that apply, respondents cited security as their top concern (62 percent), followed by governance challenges (57 percent), personnel and training (37 percent) and cost (32 percent.) “These are two different items which will have different levels of concern about security attached to them,” Ruff says. The survey indicates that adoption of the cloud is growing, though at a somewhat gradual pace. Nearly half of respondents said that they currently have some Web applications in the cloud, but most said that the cloud accounts for less than 10 percent of those apps, citing security and governance issues as the chief impediments. Fifty-eight percent said that they intend to push more applications to the cloud in the coming year. Related content opinion Website spoofing: risks, threats, and mitigation strategies for CIOs In this article, we take a look at how CIOs can tackle website spoofing attacks and the best ways to prevent them. By Yash Mehta Dec 01, 2023 5 mins CIO Cyberattacks Security brandpost Sponsored by Catchpoint Systems Inc. Gain full visibility across the Internet Stack with IPM (Internet Performance Monitoring) Today’s IT systems have more points of failure than ever before. Internet Performance Monitoring provides visibility over external networks and services to mitigate outages. By Neal Weinberg Dec 01, 2023 3 mins IT Operations brandpost Sponsored by Zscaler How customers can save money during periods of economic uncertainty Now is the time to overcome the challenges of perimeter-based architectures and reduce costs with zero trust. By Zscaler Dec 01, 2023 4 mins Security feature LexisNexis rises to the generative AI challenge With generative AI, the legal information services giant faces its most formidable disruptor yet. That’s why CTO Jeff Reihl is embracing and enhancing the technology swiftly to keep in front of the competition. By Paula Rooney Dec 01, 2023 6 mins Generative AI Digital Transformation Cloud Computing Podcasts Videos Resources Events SUBSCRIBE TO OUR NEWSLETTER From our editors straight to your inbox Get started by entering your email address below. Please enter a valid email address Subscribe