“The government environment being very complex and diverse, the cloud deployments must be customised and tested for interoperability and other issues that can lead to future problems,” says Dr. Neeta Shah, Former Director – eGovernance, Gujarat Informatics Limited, Government of Gujarat
Why do the government departments shy away from deploying cloud based solutions? What are the key technological factors that need to be overcome?
Lack of awareness about cloud computing and its benefits is one of the key reasons behind the lack of cloud deployments in the government sector. People are by nature skeptic towards new technology solutions—this is because they don’t want to take risks on behalf of a new technology which is not yet fully tested and proven in the government sector. They prefer to wait for the technology to be tested in the market before making their own deployments.
Also, the government environment being very complex and diverse, the cloud deployments must be customised and tested for interoperability and any issues that can lead to future problems. This is a major reason behind the low level of cloud deployments in the government. Another major factor is that it is difficult to quantify the tangible benefits that cloud can bring to the existing IT environment of the government.
The states have developed their state data centre, but many departments continue to have their own infrastructure for hosting their applications and data. What steps can be taken to ensure that all the departments in any state use the state data centre?
The key policy decision that we need to take is changing the IT Procurement system of the states. Currently IT Procurement is carried out on an individual project basis by different government departments. Instead of utilising the shared common IT Infrastructure available in the state data centres, various departments are having their own IT Procurement for each project. This results in a massive pile up of hardware silos, most of which are redundant and under-utilised.
These silos have piled up to such an extent that most of the state data centres are running out of data centre floor space and have already started to look for new avenues of expansion or co-location in another data centre. This problem can only be solved when there is a policy directive from the government to centralise all IT procurements through the state IT department.
What kind of reduction in operational costs is expected from cloud implementations?
Investment in the cloud is for the long-term. If one invests the CAPEX on the cloud and expects it to break-even and also get RoI within months, then the cloud strategy is flawed. In the long term cloud implementation will definitely bring down the OPEX cost compared with the traditional silo based IT Hardwares. Also, the in-built automation in cloud makes it more easy to handle and manage, thereby requiring a small team to manage and hence saving manpower related costs.
Cloud can also help governments to save on electricity bills, by increasing the Virtual Machine density on the physical servers and by making sure every square feet of data centre floor space is optimally utilised. The only recurring cost in case of the cloud will be the licensing cost, which is incurred only if one goes for the proprietary cloud implementations.
What are the ways by which IoT can have an impact on governance?
IoT is one among the new breed of technology trios, which I refer to as CBI: C-Cloud, B-Big Data, I – Internet of Things. This troika are the potential game changers for eGovernance. These three technologies can play a key role in enabling eGovernance to mature from the traditional transactional based systems to more interactive solutions.
What is your view of using Big Data analytics by government departments?
The government sector can be the biggest consumer of Big Data analytics. The massive amounts of data collected by the government departments through various means have led to the piling up of many petabytes of data in our data centres. However, the government continues to struggle to derive a meaningful analysis out of this datdue to centralisation and standardisation of the different databases and lack of interoperability. Also, there is the problem of duplication of data sets across the government machinery.