Ms Mah Yu Ling, Deputy Director, Shared Infrastructure, at IDA, gave the audience an update on the G-Cloud – the next-generation whole-of-government infrastructure.

The Civil Service values groundedness, but for a few hours, some civil servants had their head in the clouds – or rather, Cloud. During the 37th Public Sector Infocomm Seminar at the Mapletree Business Centre on 25 January, more than 250 participants heard about new ways to harness infocomm - and cloud technology especially - to meet new challenges and to better deliver “the goods” to the public.

For example, in this new era of engagement, infocomm can be used not only to handle large volumes of feedback from various channels, but also to categorise and analyse it, to understand public sentiment with regard to different issues.

Other useful applications they heard about, in various stages of rollout, were OneInbox, a means to send letters to the public electronically, thus saving on paper, printing and postage, as well as apps to improve workflow and communications between colleagues.

Then there was the implementation of Government Cloud, or G-Cloud. Ms Mah Yu Ling, Deputy Director, Shared Infrastructure (SIF), e-Government Group, Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore (IDA), introduced this next-generation whole-of-government infrastructure.

Compared to traditional modes of infrastructure deployment, where someone at the back end has to do the provisioning and configuration work, G-Cloud allows a do-it-yourself approach via a self-service portal with different options to meet different requirements. For example, some agencies may require authentication, login and other processes to adhere to ensure appropriate governance and security guidelines.

The self-service portal allows agencies to provision resources such as CPU, memory and storage, as well as to configure firewalls, load balancers and obtain utilisation reports.

From a resource provisioning standpoint, the G-Gloud allows resources to be provisioned in a very short time – through the self-service portal, click a few buttons and the resources are provisioned from the back end, so agencies can start loading their applications for testing and deployment

Besides the ease of use, G-Cloud also helps the agencies better manage the utilisation of their IT resources.

After provisioning the resources, G-Cloud also allows the monitoring of resource utilisation. A good understanding of resource utilisation helps agencies to better plan what to buy, to ensure more efficient use of resources. “The Cloud is about flexibility and agility,” noted Ms Mah.

G-Cloud, like other cloud technology, also allows for scalability. “With traditional capacity management, you need to buffer for scalability,” said Ms Mah. “You need to have the base buffer, cater for expected growth, and also the expected growth buffer, so you end up with relatively high over-capacity.”

As other organisations have been discovering, the Cloud enables agencies to cut down drastically on all the buffering, keeping it to a sufficient level to allow for changing business requirements. Based on actual usage, an agency can scale upwards from this lower base, adjusting as requirements grow on a year-on-year basis.

Designed to meet different levels of security and governance requirements, the Basic Assurance Zone of G-cloud is currently available. The Medium and High Assurance Zones, which have better security, will be available for agency deployment from February this year.