Development grants have been awarded to seven Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) proposals under a multi-agency SaaS Call for Collaboration (CFC) led by the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore (IDA). Speaking at the opening of CloudAsia 2013 on 15 May, Mr Ronnie Tay, Chief Executive Officer of IDA, said the solutions developed under this initiative are expected to be exportable to new markets overseas and replicable to different industries, driving growth in the ICT industry. Another three proposals are expected to be awarded under this thrust.

One of the companies under the first batch of grant awardees is Astoria, whose solution AstorJob is targeted at the needs of the maritime contractors industry. AstorJob offers streamlined and domain-targeted enterprise resource planning (ERP) processes to automate job management tasks and mimimise the work processes involved in invoicing and project management in this sector.

Other sectors covered by the SaaS solutions under this batch of awardees include private schools, construction, accounting, spa and wellness, retail and food distribution.

Besides supporting SaaS development, the SaaS CFC also aims to spur the demand for high-impact SaaS solutions and bring about mass adoption among small and medium enterprises (SMEs) to deliver productivity gains. In line with this, the CFC is expected to support over 600 companies, mostly SMEs, in adopting sector-specific SaaS. The support covers the cost of software subscription, hardware, consultation and training. In the longer term, 3,000 more companies are expected to benefit from these solutions.

A third objective is to promote user confidence in SaaS by inculcating industry best practices in the areas of data security, integrity, privacy, recovery and portability.

The SaaS CFC is a collaboration between IDA and SPRING Singapore, Ministry of Social and Family Development, Ministry of Education and National Trades Union Congress’s e2i (Employment and Employability Institute). Other supporting organisations and sector champions included the Maritime and Port Authority of Singapore, Council for Estate Agencies and Council for Private Education.

Besides the award of development grants under the SaaS CFC, other cloud related announcements at CloudAsia 2013 included the upcoming launch of a Data-as-a-Service (DaaS) programme in the second half of 2013, and the scheduled availability of cloud security standards in August 2013.

The DaaS programme will catalyse the development of a nationwide platform for the efficient delivery of data, on demand, to interested data buyers to develop applications for in-house or business consumption, said Mr Tay. As a start, a pilot implementation seeks to enable efficient discovery of data via a federated namespace mechanism, together with data quality metrics to help interested buyers make better-informed purchases. The initiative complements the Government's efforts in making public sector data available to the public, as it focuses on the datasets from the private and people sectors.

In conjunction with the DaaS programme, IDA has also jointly worked with Singapore's Information Technology Standards Committee to produce a Technical Reference on DaaS API (application programming interface), which was published in April 2013.

IDA has also embarked on the development of cloud security standards and guidelines for the certification of cloud service providers (CSPs). The proposed standards adopt a multi-tier approach that specifies several tiers of security provisions, to cater for the different security needs of various cloud users. The draft standards recently completed a two-month public commentary phase and are scheduled to be available as a Singapore standard in August 2013. At the same time, IDA is embarking on cross-certifying the proposed standards with international schemes such as the Cloud Security Alliance's Open Certification Framework and facilitating CSPs' ISO 27001 certification to meet the multi-tier cloud security requirements.