eGovernment cloud: should governments move to the cloud? requirement considerations

Abstract

Cloud computing is a model for enabling ubiquitous on demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction using different deployment models such as 'software as a service' (SaaS) 'platform as a service' (PaaS) and 'infrastructure as a service' (IaaS) with public private community and hybrid clouds as deployment models. In general cloud computing can be defined by considering its characteristic attributes such as multi-tenancy scalability elasticity pay as you go and self provisioning of resources. Governments around the world are actively looking into cloud computing as a means of increasing efficiency and reducing cost. Apart from the potential benefits such as increased flexibility cost reduction elastic scalability and service quality that cloud computing could offer governments different concerns such as security performance availability ability to customise investment or regulatory requirements also have to be taken into consideration. In this study first the cloud computing attributes that are needed for government use such as governance legal requirements risk management outsourcing and security issues and the requirements for eGovernment applications that are used in clouds were analysed and second eGovernment use cases were analysed and categorised according to their fit to the cloud deployment models and then the GOV. Cloud Dashboard is introduced. The results of the study revealed that parameters such as security management by vendors security architecture user access and identity management are key success factors for clouds being used for governments. Apart from that government applications themselves have to fulfil special requirements to be included in clouds such as availability authenticity transparency and interoperability.