Literature review

CloudGov: An IaaS architecture for governments in developing countries Assis Ngolo The benefits of eGovernment have been established, in that they help streamline government processes as well as provide a means to interact with a nations citizens. Governments can offer services like tax filing, social security management, document processing, and also provide a degree of unified administration. A step beyond eGovernment, an IaaS system facilitates resource provisioning, application deployment, programmatic system administration and elasticity. Below some ideas are discussed in regards to implementation, security concerns and readiness of a Cloud Government System.

1. Implementation A cloud computing offering can be composed of 3 layers, each of which with a specific goal, advantages and disadvantages. From the bottom, the first layer would be the infrastructure necessary to create the environment in which virtual machines and networking components run. According to Zhang et al (2010), by extending the virtualized environment of the infrastructure layer with mechanisms to provision and control the virtual machines in a utility computing manner, an IaaS offering can be created. In order to deploy an application, a user will need to create a virtual machine with a chosen operating system, install all necessary software and configurations, and only then can they develop or install the application to be run from the machine.

The second layer is built by creating a programming platform on top of the existing infrastructure. The hassle of managing an infrastructure is minimized by providing an API to manage storage, platform and databases, and usually favors certain programming languages over others. An application can be developed and deployed very quickly without concern for the infrastructure. This layer of course provides less control over the underlying layer.

Lastly, to Zhang et al (2010) states that the topmost layer, the SaaS layer will contain already developed software, provided as a service. If governments do not want to develop their own applications, they can simply procure cloud applications modularly, such as email, CRM and ERP. From the previous descriptions, one can conclude that the most suitable layer for a government to start building a cloud is the infrastructure layer due to the increased control over the following two layers. If a government builds its own infrastructure, it can then create an IaaS through virtualization and management tools. From this point, it can then decide to either build its applications on independent platforms, or it can further facilitate system administration and decide on a platform to build on top of the infrastructure, from which applications can be developed and deployed over a uniform environment.

2. Availability Chuob et all, 2011, consider the availability concerns of a government cloud saying that a governments effectiveness is only as good as its management system, and that in itself,

only as good as the availability of its cloud infrastructure. Therefore, to be effective, a government cloud needs to be resilient as much as it is efficient. The take a tiered availability approach, starting with the infrastructure, mentioning the TIA 942 Telecommunications Infrastructure Standards for Data Centers, and moving on to cloud service and application availability.

3. Security While for some cloud service providers, availability and performance might be the most important component to an offering, governments prioritize security above all. Not only does a government need to protect its national assets and information, it has the obligation to protect its citizens information. Tripathi et all (2011) lists several security considerations for cloud systems, as well as ways to mitigate them, and provides many opportunities for future studies. Paquette et all (2010) add that there are other risks besides security, such as policy changes and their propagation thereof, and that having a risk management department as a component to the implementation, migration and management of a government cloud is essential to a governments operation.

4. Data Sovereignty Data sovereignty, or the set of laws that govern the data in a cloud can become an issue if a government does not have the physical infrastructure to implement a cloud system and has

to procure cloud service providers overseas. An example would be a developing country using Amazons public cloud to implement its c-Government. Being Amazon a US company, would the US have sovereignty over Angolas data for example? And what happens when the US court issues a subpoena for Amazons servers, many of which contain Angolan data? Irion, Kristina (2011) attempts to answer some for these questions as well as direct further study on the topic.

Works Cited
Alok Tripathi, Abhinav Mishra. "Cloud Computing Security Considerations." 2011. Irion, Kristina. "Government cloud computing and the policies of data sovereignty." 22nd European Regional Conference of the International Telecommunications Society. 2011. Rabea Kurdi, A. Taleb-Bendiab, Martin Randles, and Mark Taylor. "E-Government Information Systems and Cloud Computing (Readiness and Analysis)." 2011 Developments in E-systems Engineering. 2011. Scott Paquette, Paul T. Jaeger, Susan C. WilsonScott Paquette. "Identifying the security risks associated with governmental use of cloud computing." 2010. Sok Chuob, Manish Pokharel, Jong Sou Park. "Modeling and Analysis of Cloud Computing Availability Based on Eucalyptus Platform for E-Government Data Center." 2011 Fifth International Conference on Innovative Mobile and Internet Services in Ubiquitous Computing. 2011. Wenjun Zhang, Qi Chen. "From E-government to C-government via Cloud Computing." 2010 International Conference on E-Business and E-Government. 2010.