eGov Masterplans

Objectives The Government Cloud (G-Cloud) provides a resilient and secure ICT shared environment that allows government agencies to procure computing resources on-demand, with greater ease and speed.

Introduction

The Government Cloud aims to provide a cloud infrastructure for the Whole-Of-Government to leverage on.

Background

The Singapore Government acknowledges that each cloud computing model provides its own level of assurance and benefits. As such, the cloud strategy for Singapore Government is to leverage the appropriate cloud for the appropriate need by adopting a multi-prong approach to cloud computing as follows:

• Leverage commercially-available public cloud offerings for appropriate needs¹ so as to benefit from lower cost of computing resources;
• Implement a private government cloud (Central G-Cloud) for whole-of-government use where security and governance requirements cannot be met by public clouds;
• Enable interoperability between Central G-Cloud and Agency G-Clouds² through a set of internal G-Cloud standards
   

¹ For instance, the Ministry Of Education's iCONnect system is a collaboration and email system for teachers built on a public cloud.
² Agencies may set up their own clouds to address specific needs which cannot be met by public clouds and Central G-Cloud.
 

Programme Details

The Government currently has a whole-of-government infrastructure (SHINE) to provide shared computing resources to government agencies on an "as-a -service" subscription model. Central G-Cloud is the next-generation infrastructure which will replace SHINE.

Central G-Cloud will provide efficient, scalable and resilient cloud computing resources and will be designed to meet two levels of security and governance requirements:

• High Assurance Zone – a physically dedicated computing resource pool which will only be used by Government to serve its high assurance needs.
• Medium Assurance Zone – a computing resource pool which will be shared with non-government cloud users to lower cost computing resources for Government; and

Central G-Cloud will provide central services such as government web service exchange, and gateways to SingPass and e-Payment services. To further aggregate whole-of-government demand to maximise cost savings to Government, the Government will identify and provide common services, such as customer relationship management and web content management, as software-as-a-service offerings on G-Cloud.

Central G-Cloud enables standardisation, and sharing of computing resources and applications at the whole-of-government level, thereby generating cost savings to Government.