Members of the cloud community gather at Cloud Asia 2012.

Singapore’s lead in cloud adoption and maturity in the region received a further boost with IDA’s award of a tender for the country’s Government cloud (G-Cloud) and the launch of several new initiatives and programmes.

The Government’s approach to cloud computing is to leverage on commercially available public clouds as well as implementing a private G-Cloud for Whole-of-Government use. Speaking at CloudAsia 2012, Mr Ronnie Tay, Chief Executive Officer of the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore (IDA), noted that the G-Cloud generates cost savings by enabling standardisation and sharing of computing resources and applications at the Whole-of-Government level.

“It will be a platform for innovation where agencies can leverage on the G-Cloud as a test-bed to pilot new and innovative applications for a small group of users without up-front cost and asset ownership,” he said. The G-Cloud tender was awarded to SingTel for a period of five years, with the option to extend it for another five.

Scheduled to be ready for deployment by end of 2012, G-Cloud will allow government agencies to easily procure cloud services to deliver services securely and quickly on demand, scaling up and down rapidly to cater to changes in workloads.

Mr Tay also noted that according to the Singapore Cloud Adoption Study commissioned by IDA in April 2012, Singapore ranked third, after Australia and Japan, in terms of cloud adoption in Asia Pacific. The study indicated that 50 per cent of businesses with Internet connections have already adopted Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and this is projected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 20 per cent, with one-third of all businesses in Singapore adopting SaaS by 2015.

To further promote cloud adoption in Singapore, the IDA has also launched its fifth Call for Cloud Computing Proposals . The Government, industry, research and development communities can receive support for compute and storage resources depending on the impact and scope of their proposed projects.

In Call 5, the focus will be on Big Data projects. Revolution Analytics, which provides expertise and advanced analytics software (Revolution R), will enable participants of Call 5 to work on and solve Big Data problems.

IDA will also be inviting applications under the SaaS Enablement Programme (SEP) for Building Information Modeling (BIM) and related software for architecture, engineering and construction community. SEP helps to fund for manpower, professional services and training for SaaS-enablement efforts. The SaaS enablement of BIM software is in line with Singapore’s Building and Construction Authority mandating e-submissions of all electronic building plans by 2015. The SaaS-enabled BIM will lower the barriers for BIM software adoption as it is made available to users on a subscription basis.

Meanwhile, the public can procure a Technical Reference (TR) document on guidelines on cloud security and service level for public cloud services’ users and another on best practices for virtualisation security. The TR documents were developed by a cloud computing standards coordinating task force with inputs from the industry. The task force comprises representatives from IDA, Singapore’s Information Technology Standards Committee, Singapore Computer Society, Singapore infocomm Technology Federation (SiTF) and Information Technology Management Association. IDA has also launched the second edition of the “Cloud Computing in Singapore” booklet, which provides relevant information on the subject as well as case studies of private and government organisations already on cloud computing.

To facilitate local infocomm companies embrace more productive business models such as cloud, a key strategy in the Infocomm Industry Productivity Roadmap was announced in March 2012. As part of the roadmap, IDA in partnership with the Workforce Development Agency and SiTF, will put in place a series of specialised master classes and courses to equip Singapore companies with the skills to transit to more productive business models. One such skill identified is software product management – the management of the software product life cycle from planning and conceptualisation, to launch and retirement. The first software product management master class and course will be conducted in June by Silicon Valley product management consultancy, 280 Group.

CloudAsia 2012, which was jointly organised by IDA and Informa Telecoms & Media Asia, was attended by over 250 participants. The event was held on 14-17 May 2012 at the Grand Hyatt Hotel in Singapore.

In other presentations at the event, security took centre stage as Mr Jim Reavis, Co-Founder and Executive Director of the Cloud Security Alliance, spoke about how the growth of cloud and mobile computing is necessitating a shift to Security-as-a-Service. Mr Wong Onn Chee, Managing Director, Infotect Security, spoke about how outbound security can address the main concern among cloud users – data leakage. In a panel discussion on securing the cloud, panellists discussed identifying and managing the key security risks inherent in using cloud-based applications.

Business strategy around the cloud was another popular topic. In a panel discussion on taking small and medium enterprises to the cloud, panellists discussed business opportunities, migration, implementation and solutions. The event also featured a CIO roundtable, which focused on the topic of embracing cloud for competitive advantage.