Recommendation 23

Departments find it easier to secure capital funding for new developments than ongoing resource funding to maintain systems and keep them up to date.59 Moving services to cloud-based providers introduces new pricing models with an increasing emphasis on ‘pay-as-you-go’, which transfers traditional capital requirements to resource expenditure.60 Limiting resource expenditure means that departments can struggle to maintain services adequately once they have been built, and this can be a false economy. Cuts to maintenance budgets can have a devastating impact on the ability to maintain services in the longer term and risk undoing all progress on legacy systems.61