The drivers I saw were partly financial and partly a matter of resource demands. The shift from CAPEX to OPEX was attractive to councils for obvious reasons as it smoothed lumpy hardware refresh cycles and made costs more predictable for IT managers trying to push through contested capital budgets. But the deeper appeal, in my experience, was operational. Moving email, disaster recovery and occasionally core business systems to vendor-hosted platforms meant handing over the unglamorous, never-ending work of patching, upgrading and ‘keeping the lights on’. The vendor took the 2am call. For ICT teams there was a genuine release of capacity, which was being quickly ear-marked for ‘value-add’ services to help business areas ‘do digital transformation’.

There was a strong push from the vendors too, and it is worth being honest about it. A fair bit of the early cloud momentum was driven by vendors moving products to subscription and cloud-hosted models and, in some cases, setting timelines that left customers little choice but to follow. That is not a criticism so much as context: the sector's first big migration wave was a mix of councils being pulled by the marketed benefits (faster, cheaper, less staff, less risk…but that could be a whole other article) and pushed by product roadmaps they did not control. Recognising that dynamic matters, because the same question of who held the leverage, council or the vendor, has ebbed and flowed over the past ten years and has really come back in force today with the AI era.

Cloud changed the conversation about what a council needed to own. For decades the instinct had been to run everything yourself, with the logic that you could not depend on or afford anyone else to do it. The cloud removed that instinct. It made the argument more solid that managing infrastructure was not ‘core business’ and something a council was never going to differentiate on and was therefore better left to experts in the marketplace. That was a big shift in mindset, and it set up the more ambitious thinking that seemed to follow…if you do not need to own the servers, what else are you running in-house out of habit rather than necessity?

None of this was without issues, and the concerns of the time were legitimate and required informed decisions. Data sovereignty was front of mind and the question of where that data physically lived, and under whose jurisdiction, was a serious one. I remember vendor lock-in being a very common push back argument. It was easy to move into a platform and much harder, and more expensive, to move out, which shifted bargaining power towards suppliers in a way some councils did end up regretting from my experience. Underpinning everything in the regions was connectivity. The benefits of cloud assume reliable internet, and in large parts of rural and remote Australia that assumption did not hold. Patchy NBN connectivity meant the cloud's promise of "anytime, anywhere" service was real in the metros and aspirational in the regions, and another step down again in rural settings. These were not reasons to avoid the cloud, but they were reasons to approach it with eyes wide open. The Councils that did best staged their migrations and kept hybrid options where connectivity demanded it.

Compared with what was to come later, moving email and disaster recovery to the cloud must have felt like “ezy-mode”. But the councils that built solid cloud foundations between 2016 and 2019 were the ones that coped when the world turned upside down in 2020 due to COVID 19. You couldn’t enable a whole workforce to operate remotely overnight if your systems are chained to a server in a building no one is allowed to enter. I guess to make the point here, the cloud was not the transformation. It was the platform the transformation would later stand on, and the moment councils realised their core business wasn’t running commodity infrastructure and start to focus on delivering customer focused digital services and employee efficiency. At the end of the day, I don’t think there are too many who miss the flashing lights of a full server room.