“It turns out during the last two years, we have saved THB 600 million (US$18.8 million). I would say [this is] at least 30% reduction in costs,” he said.
Over 100 Thai government agencies are currently hosting around 500 applications on the G-Cloud. The e-government authority’s initial budget for the project is THB 1400 million (US$43.8 million).
Besides the lower costs, the government cloud is also allowing agencies to respond quickly to citizens’ and officials’ requirements in delivering services. For instance, the National Statistics Office was using tablets to collect data during a national survey across every province in Thailand. “After a day of operating their system [on the government cloud], they asked us to upgrade the virtual machines to 10 times the initial capacity because their load had gone up. We were able to provide this in 2-3 hours,” Segkhoonthod explained.
The E-Government Agency is working to ensure that the government cloud can be securely used by agencies. Segkhoonthod said that they are in the process of implementing a standard for cloud security, recommended by the Cloud Security Alliance, called Security, Trust and Assurance Registry. He believes that it is important to meet such international standards because it gives customers a third-party assurance of the cloud’s security.
It has taken measures to ensure that administrative access by agencies to the government cloud is secured. “Everybody within the government has to go through a private network” when accessing the cloud, he said. It also plans to implement a two-step verification for administrator access to the government cloud, instead of the usual username and password.
Next year, the agency plans to start hosting one or two more complex and bigger systems on the government cloud. “We have been working with agencies including the Ministry of Public Health and the Ministry of Commerce. Most of these systems are live, so it’s not easy to move them to the cloud. We expect, next year, we should have at least one or two big systems on our G-Cloud,” Segkhoonthod said.
He expects to get a budget of THB 200-300 million (US$6.3-9.4 million) for the government cloud for the next fiscal year starting in October.
The E-Government Agency’s Government Cloud project has been shortlisted under the Cloud category for 2014 FutureGov Awards. The winner will be announced at the 11th annual FutureGov Summit in Kuala Lumpur in October.
---
Autor(en)/Author(s): Medha Basu
Quelle/Source: futureGov, 26.08.2014
Bitte besuchen Sie/Please visit:
