Mr James Kang: By providing the appropriate level of resilience and security, the cloud strategy enables public agencies to leverage on the benefits of the cloud.

The Singapore Government is adopting a multi-pronged approach to cloud computing by leveraging on commercially-available public cloud offerings where appropriate and implementing a private government cloud called Central G-Cloud for whole-of-government use for security and governance requirements that cannot be met by public clouds.

The Government will also put in place a set of internal G-Cloud standards to ensure interoperability between Central G-Cloud and agency clouds which have been set up to address specific agency needs.

The Government’s cloud strategy is part of a wider effort under Singapore’s new e-Government masterplan (eGov2015) to catalyse whole-of-government transformation through the deployment of a next-generation infrastructure for the public sector. As part of this strategy, public clouds will be harnessed where appropriate to achieve the best value for money. An example of the use of a public cloud is the Ministry of Education’s iCONnect system, which is a collaboration and email system for teachers. Central G-Cloud, which will replace the existing whole-of-government infrastructure SHINE, will provide efficient, scalable and resilient cloud computing resources.

It will be designed to meet two levels of security and governance requirements. A High Assurance Zone will provide a physically-dedicated computing resource pool that is used only by the government to meet its high assurance needs, while a Medium Assurance Zone will comprise a computing resource pool that is shared with non-government cloud users to leverage better economies of scale to lower the cost of computing. For example, a co-creation platform such as data.gov.sg, which makes government data accessible to the private sector to develop new value-added services for the public, could reside in the Medium Assurance Zone.

By providing the appropriate level of resilience and security that is required by the Government, the cloud strategy enables public agencies to leverage on the benefits of the cloud, said Mr James Kang, Assistant Chief Executive of the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore.

For example, through the Central G-Cloud, the agencies can derive cost savings through standardisation and the sharing of computing resources and applications at a whole-of- government level. Central G-Cloud will provide central services such as a government web service exchange and gateways to SingPass and e-Payment services. The Government will also identify common services such as customer relationship management and web content management and provide them as software-as-a-service offerings on Central G-Cloud.

The tender for Central G-Cloud will be called by end 2011.