IfG.CC - The Potsdam eGovernment Competence Center

Satainrattanaram School was selected to be the first of the six schools to try out “Braincloud Solution” to connect school via the tablets to the network provided by the government to enable students and teachers to access learning materials, courseware, educational resources, and teachers in Bangkok.

A research study, 'The Enabling Technologies of a Low-Carbon Economy - a Focus on Cloud Computing’ funded by the Global e-Sustainability Initiative (GeSI) and Microsoft estimates that if 80 percent of enterprises in Brazil, Canada, China, the Czech Republic, France, Germany, Indonesia, Poland, Portugal, Sweden and the UK migrated their email, CRM and groupware applications to the cloud they would reduce annual greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by the equivalent of 4.5 million tonnes of CO2. This represents about two percent of ICT’s contribution to GHG emissions in those countries and is equivalent to taking 1.7 million cars off the road.

It's easy to see the benefits of cloud computing, and moving to the cloud is often an easy decision to make - at least, in theory. In practice, of course, it's not just a single decision; there are a huge number of other questions that also need to be answered. One of those questions is which deployment model to go for: public or private cloud?

Crucially, the difference between public and private clouds is all to do with tenancy: a public cloud has many users, while a private cloud is used by a single organisation. It has nothing to do with access (you can run private services in a public cloud, or vice versa) or with ownership (a third party can own and operate your private cloud for you).

The industry roils with definitions and explanations of cloud. These definitions come from product vendors cloud-washing their products, cloud providers positioning their cloud infrastructure, IT teams attempting to cloud-paint their efforts in virtualization, and even from consultants writing articles like this.

This article will examine the essence of cloud and will provide a solid working foundation against which progress toward the cloud can be objectively assessed.

The OpenNebula Project announced today a major new release of its OpenNebula Toolkit, a fully open source cloud computing tool for managing a data center's virtual infrastructure. The toolkit includes features for integration, management, scalability, security and accounting that many enterprise IT shops need for private and hybrid cloud adoption. This newest release also emphasizes standardization, interoperability and portability, providing cloud users and administrators with a choice of several popular cloud interfaces and hypervisors, and a flexible architecture that can accommodate practically any hardware and software combination in a data center.

Health Services

“Our focus has always been on ICT projects that impact and benefit multiple agencies,” said Casambre, whose team is working with the Department of Health (DOH) on getting the systems interoperable.

The ‘X Internet’ represents the next stage in this evolution. It’s been used to refer to the ’Executable Internet’ and also the ‘Extended Internet’, with both meaning the Internet expanding another order of magnitude to become an “Internet of things”.

The meeting was headed by H.E. Salem Khamis Al Shair Al Suwaidi, Deputy Director General for Information and eGovernment Sector, TRA. It was attended by a number of senior managers at TRA including Salem Al Housani, Deputy Director - Emirates eGovernment, Mohammed Gheyath, Executive Director Technology Development Affairs, Mohammed Al Zarooni, .aeDA Director, Tariq Al Hawi, aeCERT Director, Majid Al Madhloum, Security Quality Services Team Leader, Ahmad Hassan, Monitoring and Response Team Leader, Abdulrahman Al Marzouqi, Manager - Internet Developments and Meshal bin Hussain, Operation Manager.

GSA officials expect the migration to the cloud to reduce inefficiencies and lower costs by 50 percent over the next five years.

The agency has awarded Unisys Corp. a $6.7 million, five-year task order under the Alliant Governmentwide Acquisition Contract. Unisys has partnered with Google, Tempus Nova, and Acumen Solutions. GSA will use Google Apps for Government , a suite of cloud computing applications, which received Federal Information Security Management Act certification and accreditation from the government in July. The Google Apps platform consists of Google Docs, Gmail, spreadsheets, a video tool and Google Sites.

"We now have a government-owned cloud set," said Lt. Gen. Zahner during his keynote address at the Biometric Consortium Conference here. "We're leveraging cloud technology where it's needed."

The organisation has adopted the technology since 2000 to incorporate government information network and GRP (government resource planning), which currently incorporates 29 government departments having 25 IT models used by 68,000 employees.

The government body does not have immediate plans to get on to the public cloud-computing domain but is also not ruling it out.

Dubai eGovernment is in discussions to offer public cloud services to small and medium businesses (SMB) to help them cut costs on initial deployment of the technology.

For an SMB to conduct business on the private cloud is an expensive proposition. The company will have to invest in building up its data centre and implementing the software required for starting up business on the cloud.

On Monday it will witness the activities of the forum's second and last day. The GIA had previously extended invitations to all directors general, chief executive officers, eServices directors, information technology (IT) directors, the staff of IT departments and those in charge of eServices at government bodies to attend the forum and get familiarized with the new government shared services, which represent the landmarks of a genuine process for paving the way to eGovernment at the federal level.

A G-Cloud 4 framework, just unveiled by the GDS, strengthens the UK government’s on-line procurement effort. This initiative is fully redesigning the way agencies will source products and services in the cloud.

The UK government spends an estimated £45 billion on goods and services. This offers agencies much-needed leverage to access and negotiate services in the cloud, in an open and competitive marketplace.

According to the statement, public sector agencies must “consider and fully evaluate potential cloud solutions first – before they consider any other option”. Government agencies will need to prove that they are saving costs if they choose to go with an on-premise model.

The UK has one of the most advanced cloud environments in the world, according to Westminster City CIO David Wilde.

Wilde, who has worked as CIO for Westminster since 2008, said that it is surprising but the UK has become a leader in this field.

“Over the last three years the UK government has embraced the cloud, this combined with a challenging cloud debate fostered by the press and the conference circuit has meant that the private sector has responded with solutions to the challenges faced by end users.

A recent survey of public sector senior finance functionaries has calculated the public sector IT budget needs to be cut by £3.6bn. The survey was sponsored by VMware, which unsurprisingly was using the findings to strengthen its cloud infrastructure proposition.

On the face of it, it's a no-brainer to suggest outsourcing government IT infrastructures as a way of achieving quick wins in cost-cutting, but there are still many serious warnings against doing so.

City of Westminster CIO David Wilde is making something of a name for himself on the CIO circuit in that – in a high-profile role that is often cautious – he is an unashamed proponent of such hot topics as shared services and cloud computing.

“In the public sector there’s been talk for a number of years about shared services but not a lot happened,” he says. “There were counties or districts and maybe schools administration shared services but not at the level of finance teams, for example. Because of the financial constraints we’ll drive that harder. Rather than having silos, it will be ERPs and sharing teams.”

Heading into the cloud, published by the Society, sets out the benefits of cloud computing, a phenomenon that enables the provision of computing resources to be shared on a utility basis. Data and resource centres are shared between multiple client organisations and their users get access through internet browser interfaces.

Cloud computing and business process outsourcing (BPO) will gain momentum during 2011, as the government looks for new ways to cut costs, according to a report by analyst firm Ovum.

The report, entitled ‘2011 Trends to Watch: Government Technology‘, predicts that government departments will offer more services via the cloud, and increase their outsourcing, particularly of back-office processes, over the coming year.