Towards Cloud-based e-Government Solutions for Developing Countries: Critical Success Factors and Expected Benefits

Qusay Ishaq1, Muhammad Ehsan Rana2

1Technology Park Malaysia, 57000, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia,

/Staffordshire University

2Technology Park Malaysia, 57000, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia,

/ UCTI

ABSTRACT: The rapid development of the IT infrastructure and the increase in Internet usage around the world has tremendously enhanced the ability to provide e-services for customers. Generally cost is considered as one of the major barriers to implement such solutions for developing countries. This paper focuses on implementing cloud-based solutions to overcome this hindrance motivated by its potential to reduce the capital expenditure and delivering scalable IT services at lower costs. A model of critical success factors for e-Government initiatives and the expected benefits of cloud adoption is been discussed in this study. A case study discussing successful adoption of cloud computing technologies in the e-Government solutions is also presented to emphasize that cloud computing technologies are scalable, flexible and feasible enough to meet the demands of IT infrastructure in governmental agencies.

Keywords:Cloud Computing, e-Government

1.0INTRODUCTION

Governments around the world are promoting the provisioning of the best possible services and practices to perform its day-to day activities, especially in the government agencies that have direct interaction with citizens. The utilization of the latest technologies is vital to reduce the time required by processes to the minimum, aiming at improving the relationships with citizens by providing more effective and efficient services [1].In a recent study, Burroughs [2] found that about 77.4% of people seeking government information or services, first uses online resources such as Google, Yahoo, or other commercial search engines.

On a global scale, the exponential growth of online web-based applications has enhanced the ability to provide e-services for customers in both public (such as e-Government) and private sectors (such as e-Business) [3]. The high expense of IT investments poses an imminent setback to implement such solutions for many developing countries, consequently adopting cloud computing technologies is driven by the potentials to reduce the capital expenditure and delivering scalable IT services at lower cost [4].

Several examples indicate that cloud computing technology has become a strategic direction for numerous governmental agencies and is already been employed in critical areas of the government's IT infrastructure. Internet technology is commonly been used to deliver public services to citizens as a way to maintain a fundamental relationship [5]. Governments nowadays encourage the use of technology to develop the core business processes in order to reduce cost, effort, response time, and errors [6].

Cloud computing service providers offers wide range of services and applications to enterprises, individuals, and government agencies such as database mining and management, information storing and sharing, and deploying web services that have the ability to solve complex scientific problems [7]. United States Government has shown great interest in the promising capabilities of cloud computing for governmental data storage and processing. As matter of fact, the United States federal government has already started to implement cloud computing within their IT strategies [8]. Among other IT-oriented technologies, cloud computing is perceived distinctive strategic tool to facilitate information sharing, applications processing and data storage. Moreover it can be seen as a cost-saving strategy comparing to other technological architectures.

Developing countries are way behind in this competition of offering e-Government solutions to facilitate their citizens. The most noteworthy challenges they face are infrastructure limitations, government officials’ resistance, and scarcity of technical staff and lack of communication among governmental agencies [9] [10]. Developing e-Government applications is a complex process in terms of management and engineering. It could be costly and inefficient if done by the local government agencies only. However, on the other hand, some highly significant characteristics of e-Government solutions such as operations reliability and efficiency make adopting cloud services in the e-Government solutions inevitable [11]. Adopting cloud computing in the e-Government services provides many opportunities to enhance effectiveness, efficiency and friendliness of the public sector. It eliminates delays in processes, improves employee satisfaction and hence peoples’ quality of life that eventually facilitate economic growth [12].

2.0BACKGROUND

Cloud computing solutions provide access of real-time networks for a pool of shared resources that can be situated anywhere in the world. One of the key solutions provided by the cloud is the ability to develop applications that can be easily scaled and incorporated into other applications. Cloud solutions are seamlessly agile and oriented towards flexible reconfiguration of components forming the operational processes. Unlike web applications, cloud computing environment would shorten the solution implementation cycles and reduce the initial costs.

Tsai [13] states that there are several aspects to be mindfully thought of before adopting the services or applications of the cloud computing. Firstly, the necessary conditions of both the server and database on the frontend must be trusted and conformed to the established international standards of security measures. Secondly, governmental agencies should recommend utilizing the corresponding services of cloud computing that are offered by a server side. Thus it manages to achieve the goal of reducing the needed budget and cost of storage and manipulation requirement for the government agency.

Numerous improvements can be achieved by using electronic services such as using VoIP to replace traditional communication costs, using video conferencing to enhance customer support, reducing error rate of manual data entry methods [14], and using a cloud-based email system can save up to 60 % of the monthly costs[15]. Thus the process accuracy and efficiency increased and cost reduced. It is important to keep in mind that these cost reduction examples are not applicable for all cloud services as it depends on many factors such as security, privacy and processes complexity.

There are several existing examples that how ICT contributed in adding value for governmental systems and thus it is acknowledged as a very important source of growth and innovation. This can be noticed among various countries during the financial crisis where high rate of unemployment and debt increasing happened when the economic crisis hit hard [16]. One such instance is when the Spanish government had referred to the ICT sector to formulate disaster recovery plans. The government at that time depended on the ICT services as a source of innovation and growth, although this sector has affected by the financial crisis but comparatively not like other service sectors.

Fig.1: the Spanish ICT sector performance during the economic crisis

OECD [12] based on Spanish national institute of statistics,

In the wake of the 2008-2009 financial and economic crisis, firms have looked for ways to consolidate their ICT infrastructure and services and increase return on their investments. During that time, cloud computing appeared as an interesting option [16]. Some large companies adopted cloud computing for non-mission critical processes to meet the IT services peak demand such as NASDAQ when it used Amazon’s web services to provide historical stock market data. Other small and Medium Sized Enterprises (SME) have deployed its ICT infrastructure and services to the cloud to make use of the scalability and its power of cutting operational costs.

All the previously mentioned examples aim to show that the ICT sector -especially by using the cloud computing technology- has the ability to cut cost and enhance the efficiency of the provided services. ICT sector has proved its efficiency even during the economic crisis period in both private and public sectors. Likewise, the developing countries can promote and consider these as encouraging factors to deploy cloud computing services in their core processes, leading to the implementation of best practices to develop and deploy e-Government solutions through benchmarking.

3.0CRITICAL SUCCESS FACTORS

There are five critical success factors [17] considered as pillars that form the cornerstones for e-Government initiatives success as shown in the figure below. If any of these pillars fail, most likely the whole e-Government project will suffer seriously to achieve the set goals of e-Government.

Fig2. E-Government pillars, adopted from Rabaiah [13]

3.1 Leadership

Strongpolitical leadership of the national government is very important to directly establish the political mechanismsto realize collaboration among ministries that share interests and agendas. This factor is also required to give orders for sufficient resource allocation, authority, and result reporting [18], [14]. Adopting new technologies in governments’ core processes that directly interact with customers (i.e. citizens or businesses) requires wise leadership that balances between potential benefits and associated risks; that leads to develop a consistent vision for e-government. The leadership is also required in the design phase to solve any conflicts or interoperability issues as building e-Government system is definitely a top-down approach [19], [20].

3.2 Reform

Many developing countries still using paper-based processes to keep the hierarchical authorization fashion valid which is a traditional departmental model. Modifying current laws to identify and separate administrative units for data responsibility should follow the strong leadership in order to overcome any interoperability issues, and to have holistic view of the whole system developed. Otherwise cloud computing in the public sector may lead to non-conformed results or side effects. The main goal of the reform is to allow more professional and specialized service provision in order to create more efficient administration [21], [22].

3.3 People

Involvement of people in such reform to get feedback regarding the provided services is essential for further development and achieving more customer satisfaction. Local developers are also required to develop specific customization to the available software in the cloud to fit the local authorities or other government agencies use [22]. Hence assist in offering more satisfaction for the people and make use of their abilities and knowledge in software development.

3.4 Technology

Governmental agencies create very large amount of structured and unstructured data which needs to be analyzed, processed, and linked. The processes of storing, accessing, processing such huge amount of data is considered as major and fundamental challenge to deploy e-Government services using the traditional computing recourses [23]. Cloud computing technology promises to provide almost unlimited computational power, with high accessibility to information anytime, beside the ability to meet the peak load cheaply and rapidly to anticipate sudden increase in demands [19]. Moreover, this technology provides an opportunity for developers to develop their own applications and even platforms depending on their IT capabilities [4].

3.5 Collaboration

E-services provided by the government should be used and delivered fast and it must support simultaneous teamwork on the same data to conduct meetings with participants located in different geographical locations. Moreover, different users/developers can run the same applications with different datasets. Hence, collaboration is critical and crucial to adopt cloud technologies to eliminate redundancy and duplication [21]. It is known that most of the government agencies have the same or similar data processing needs; hence, units of the same type require the same software functionality to manage their operations. Thus, cloud computing can be considered as one of the best solutions for such cases through its ability to provide software as a service to serve all government agencies using the same application with minor modifications to meet each agency needs. The modification in the cloud computing will affect the metadata only and not the application source code [3].

4. BENEFITS OF USING CLOUD-BASED SOLUTIONS FOR E-GOVERNMENT

There are many expected benefits of using cloud computing technologies in the e-Government sector which include but not limited to:

4.1 Rapid Elasticity

Cloud computing is designed to provide the services with infinite scalability which is considered as one of its basic characteristics [20]. Clients have an access to a huge virtualized resource pool which allows them to meet the unpredictable load on peak periods in an efficient, resilient, and cost effective way because the cost per unit reduces with the increase in number of units [22]. Thus, the performance and economical sustainability are balanced. Moreover, cloud computing resources can be scaled up/down automatically and can be purchased in any quantity in any time [23].

4.2 Maintenance and Technical Support

Cloud computing service providers host the purchased applications and servers. They also handle the software updates and provide professional technical support. Here the beauty of the cloud appears for the e-Government solutions especially for small country side government offices because neither the hiring of such trained and professional staff is affordable nor the professionals prefer to work in such far places [3]. Furthermore, cloud technologies don’t require installing or deploying software updates for applications on each single PC [20], [24]. This will save cost, time, and the requirement of the trained staff for developing countries and may enhance systems efficiency (by preventing maintenance errors) and effectiveness (by accelerating standard procedures).

4.3 Cost Effectiveness

The existing cloud computing service models have been focused on providing cost effective services for enterprises and governmental entities. It generates an opportunity to shift from investment cost to operational cost by reducing the expenditure of purchasing highly expensive systems and hiring professional staff to manage and maintain [23]. Hence one of the major barriers of having the latest and high technology infrastructure will be reduced and new opportunities to invest in the developing countries will increase further.

4.4 Disaster Recovery

The mission critical nature of technology based solutions is highly reflected inthe disaster recovery. It is really a critical issue to the survival of most organizations to ensure that they have the ability to survive in disasters that might hit their IT infrastructure. Disaster recovery plans in the clouds are providing organizations with more options to restore data rapidly and effectively comparing to a traditional disaster recovery model [20]. It changes disaster recovery concept by reducing costs and the recovery time [24]. By using cloud as a backup for disaster recovery, governments can save a snapshot of the server on daily basis and also can save it off-site using a third party storage service provider which has the ability to save it on multiple locations.

4.5 Green ICT Eco-Friendly Systems

The exponential use of ICT devices in the governmental sector has created a negative effect on the environment as it increases the rate of carbon dioxide emission and involves in more power consumption [24]. Cloud computing is comparatively more suited in reducing the power consumption and providing eco-friendly systems through virtualized services. Using the virtualized services would reduce up to 90% of typical PC power consumption [25].

5.0 CLOUD SERVICES DEPLOYMENT IN GOVERNMENTAL SECTORS CASE STUDY

official web portal of the United States government is one of the busiest website portals in the world asit receives approximately 342,000 visits daily (140 million visitors per year) [26]. It is the best site to visit when U.S. government services are required. It is designed to assist U.S. citizens to interact with the government departments efficiently. However, users frequently suffered long delays and downtimes during high traffic periods, such as voting seasons,monthly unemployment statistics release days, and natural disasters.In order to overcome this problem, U.S. administration decided to deploy new IT hardware devices, which sat Idle most of the time when there is no high demand to access the web portal. It also consumes more power and requires additional security features such as multifactor authentication and physical on-site security at the data center building. The time required to upgrade this site (including the procurements) was up to nine months. The General Services Administration (GSA) was paying annually about two million U.S. dollars for software licenses and hardware upgrades in addition to 350,000 US dollars for staff costs [27].

A better approach suggested by Vivek Kundra, United States first federal Chief Information Officer (CIO), to migrate to the clouds was selected for the following considerations:

  • Flexibility of the cloud computing platform: the benefit of paying for a baseline capacity for normal traffic periods, but it can accommodate large traffic when needed and save cost when it’s not being used.
  • Minimal time for migration: because of the sensitivity of the services provided, it needs the minimum time to complete the migration. The actual migration process took 10 days only, while the test validation occurred in one week.
  • Additional security elements: all the security requirements for the website administration are met such as multifactor authentication (MFA) to access the portal, packet flow analysis, 128-bit encryption for traffic, and resource tracking. Furthermore, a special data centre has been built to meet the security specifications of the physical building according to the Ministry of Defence standards.

The outcome of migration to the cloud resulted in reducing cost (up to 90%), improved capabilities, system flexibility and complete process automation. Thus, customer requests are handled in real time and allowed users to access data to integrate with other websites [25]. Cloud-based solution made upgrades to the site takes only a single day, which previously took nine months to accomplish [29]. Consequently, the availability of the website increased up to 99.99 % with almost zero downtime monthly. The annual budget allocated to reduced to 650.000 US dollars only [27].

The main challenge for this case is that the web portal is always exposed to cyber attacks because it is connected to the Internet. Hence, the cloud service provider should play only partial role in data protection, and the administration must play the major role through storing information in an internal data centre to avoid any security breach that might occur.