Cloud and e-governance

Cloud Computing provides a great opportunity for governments across the globe, to provide reliable e-Governance quickly, at lower costs. Features like application virtualization, end-to-end service management, instant deployment and ease of maintenance are catalysing application deployment on the Cloud.

Higher speeds of deployment mean proper planning, execution, training and good management. A Cloud infrastructure can greatly reduce overall costs for large enterprises and organizations—such as government departments that maintain and manage e-services for e-governance and help in efficiently utilizing the taxpayer's money.

In this paper, Reddy Raja A, Director of Cloud Computing at Imaginea and Vasudeva Varma of International Institute of Information Technology (IIIT), Hyderabad, examine the role of Cloud computing standards and architectures in framing a good e-Governance strategy so that governments can realize the potential benefits of Information Technology while providing quicker and more cost-effective e-services.

After describing key cloud computing characteristics and the cloud taxonomy, the paper goes on to discuss the benefits, risks and strategies for cloud migration. It also explains public, private and hybrid clouds. Compliance standards such as SAS 70, HIPPA and Sarbanes-Oxley Act are also discussed.

For a complete analysis of the role of cloud in e-Governance download the white paper.