Transforming Government Services through Hybrid Clouds
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We are living in an age of change where governments are expected to deliver fast and responsive services to their citizens.
New and emerging global risks – tepid global growth, huge volatility in financial markets, terrorism, and global warming related disasters are just some examples – pose unprecedented challenges to governments, often on short notice.
Citizens want their governments to be able to master such risks or at least mitigate the effects at a local level in a fast and responsive way.
At the same time, the ability of citizens to voice their frustrations have been growing exponentially as global information networks and social media have become ubiquitous.
In the private sector, markets offer consumers unprecedented levels of choice and service responsiveness. Government services, likewise, can and should be better attuned to public needs and wants.
A failure to keep up will diminish the public’s trust that their government can deliver.
In order to fully play their roles as guides and catalysts to societal change, governments need to transform themselves, and technology can play a large part in this.
According to the 2012 United Nations e-government survey released in Feb. 2012, technology solutions can be used as more than just a means to deliver basic e-services. They can also be used
as a catalyst to revitalize lagging economic and social sectors.
Beyond costs, governments can and should also rethink e-governance as a transformational tool.
Instead of siloed services, a good e-governance vision that places greater emphasis on linkages between government structures can create cohesive, coordinated and integrated processes for inclusive sustainable development, the survey argued.
Enter the cloud
Cloud computing is an incredibly powerful technology concept that can help with this government transformation.
Although it is widely used in the consumer SMB market – Gmail, salesforce.com, and Amazon Web Services are just some examples – the cloud is applicable to not just the corporate sector but also the government sector.
A well-architected cloud roadmap offers a great way to leverage the scalability and agility of the cloud paradigm to provide inexpensive, accountable e-services to citizens.
Instead of being limited by the inherent costs and complexity of integrating and managing traditional on-premise server-based systems, migrating e-services to the cloud allows a cost-effective, scalable and agile solution.
According to research and advisory company TechNavio in a report published in March 2013 , the global cloud computing market for governments is growing at an annual compound rate of 6.2 percent from 2012 to 2016.
A key factor for this growth is the need for reduced cost of ownership in a world where economic growth is slower (as compared to the previous decade).
One fear, though, is that the cloud is insecure or that the privacy of the data can be compromised. Security and data governance issues are preventing governments from more quickly adopting cloud (especially public clouds), said the report.
Hybrid is the future
The solution is hybrid clouds. A mix of both public and private clouds, the hybrid cloud is the best of both worlds. A well-designed hybrid cloud roadmap takes advantage of the low-cost efficiencies, scalability and agility of public cloud resources, yet has the high security and data governance of a private cloud.
One example of such a roadmap is Singapore’s Government Cloud , or G-cloud.
In their roadmap, they spelled out that each cloud computing model has its own level of assurance and benefits, and thus a multi-prong approach is necessary.
For less sensitive applications, a commercially available public cloud application can be used to benefit from cost efficiencies.
Where security and governance requirements cannot be met by public clouds, a private government cloud (the central G-cloud) is implemented for the whole of government to use.
In addition to this, the framework also entails interoperability between the G-cloud and other agency clouds. Building a cohesive integrated -hybrid cloud platform means faster, more responsive e-services can be delivered to citizens.
Singapore is hardly unique as a government looking at hybrid clouds.
At a 2012 FutureGov Summit in Oct. 2012, a premier Asia Pacific public sector technology forum, a majority of the respondents (63.3 percent) believed that the future of public sector cloud computing is in hybrid clouds.
The forum survey polled 151 leaders and technology advisors in the public sector from 22 countries around the region and the world.
Compared to public clouds (21.1 percent) and private clouds (7.3 percent), it certainly seems that hybrid clouds are a technology platform of choice to help transform government e-services.
