> because it can’t hire some system administrators? Spoken like someone who has never worked in the public sector. Hiring can easily take 6+ months or more due

> because it can’t hire some system administrators? Spoken like someone who has never worked in the public sector. Hiring can easily take 6+ months or more due to an ever-increasing list of requirements that government HR is required to fulfill, not least of which is passing a security clearance which takes even more time. The best people on the market rarely have the patience for this. Once your employees do get hired - on-boarding can take another few/several/more months, getting various permissions, technical documentation, etc. Everything is out-of-date because making changes requires committee consensus, in a culture that is risk-averse, because nobody notices when you out-perform (after all, the requirements were also set by a committee that doesn't know who you are) but something going wrong is grounds for termination. Public sector work over-relies on hiring contractors precisely to shift blame for failure to the contractors. Managed database services are excellent tools to shift this kind of catastrophic risk of data loss to a contractor/vendor (who is managing the database). Governments not owning their data isn't due to technical or budgetary limitations - it's strictly cultural.