Cloud computing brings key advantages to the governments facing conflicting IT challenges. However, the cloud paradigm is still fragmented and concerns over data privacy and regulatory issues presents significant barriers to its adoption. Cloud computing is expected to provide new ways to run IT in public sector. At the same time, it presents significant challenges for governments, and to make the most of cloud, public sector organizations need to make some important decisions. Governments planning to migrate to the cloud are actively moving to harness digital services but with different focus, reasons, and strategy. However, the degree of cloud adoption by the public sector around the globe varies significantly. Most governments are piloting cloud computing but there are huge differences between each country. This chapter explores the state of the art of cloud computing applications in the public sector; various implications and specific recommendation are also provided.
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The shift from client-server computing to the cloud computing is bringing a paradigm change in Information Technology (IT). Cloud computing provides cheaper, faster, easier, more flexible, and more effective IT. Where this paradigm will take us, is difficult to anticipate. However, the rising tide of emerging IT technologies is carrying both private and public sectors, both locally and globally, into territories, which are new and uncharted. This is the era of open data, and the consumerization of IT. We see a transformation of dynamics between public sector and users of public services. With increasing user expectations, several IT-related issues have become more significant than ever before. These issues include service delivery, efficiency, transparency, and quality of service etc. With the evolution of technology, while the technological capabilities are rising, the technology deployment risks are reducing. Governments are finding technology deployments easier and less expensive and continuing to leverage technology to provide modern services to their citizens. However, a world that is increasingly connected than ever before pose serious challenges for the governments. Increasing amounts of data poses serious issues related to access, storage, and use of this data including sovereignty, security, and privacy (Lori, 2009). The biggest challenge for governments is to find ways to leverage technology while meeting the above-mentioned challenges and adhering to standards of compliance and security.
Cloud computing has emerged as a solution for a broad array of computing needs and requirements such as custom software environments (Armbrust et al., 2010; Erl et al., 2013). As such, cloud computing has drawn significant attention from both industry and research scientists. Cloud services, both public and private, has demonstrated potential of providing scalable and cost-effective services that can handle various enterprise and web workloads and can be pooled so that a large number of users can access them economically (Pokharel & Park, 2009; Bojanova et al., 2013).