Singapore government to set up private cloud

Come end of 2011, the Singapore government will call an open tender for Central G-Cloud, a private government cloud for whole-of government use where security and governance requirements cannot be met by public clouds. Central G-Cloud is set up as the new central whole-of-government infrastructure for agencies to reap the benefits of cloud computing,” said James Kang, Assistant Chief Executive, Government Chief Information Office, Infocomm Development Authority (IDA) to FutureGov Asia Pacific. “The adoption of cloud computing for the next central whole-of-government infrastructure is a timely next step in this journey towards a new platform that will be more agile and more resilient.”
The Central G-Cloud will be designed to meet two levels of security and governance requirements (High Assurance Zone and Medium Assurance Zone) and will provide central services such as government web service exchange and gateways to SingPass, the country’s single sign-on identity for e-government services. Government agencies will have to assess the suitability of the Central G-Cloud based on their business needs before deciding whether or not to move their applications and services to it. IDA will also enable interoperability between the Central G-Cloud and agency clouds through internal G-Cloud standards.
While these internal standards have not been defined since the project is in very initial stages, Kang suggested: “One possibility is to have security and cloud API standards which will enable Central G-Cloud and agency clouds to inter-operate to share resources.” Since the tender hasn’t been called, IDA will only have cost estimates for the project after they have received industry proposals.

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