THE government expects to reduce its expenses in technology solutions and, at the same time, improve its overall operational efficiency, after formally awarding the contract to build, operate and transfer a complete cloud solution to Vibal Group Inc.
Without disclosing how much the savings will be, Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT) Undersecretary Denis F. Villorente said the Government Cloud Service (GovCloud) will help the government “reduce costs, boost employee productivity and improve its online services”.
“The GovCloud shall provide a complete cloud solution, allowing us to act as a cloud broker with the ability to rapidly scale the infrastructure for government,” he said. “It accelerates the agencies’ deployment of data and other resources online.”
GovCloud was initially set up to support the project’s applications and services. To accommodate other agencies, it has expanded through the implementation of the Next Generation Cloud and the Government Common Platform Cloud.
The cloud infrastructure will allow the provision of virtual machines, and will enable agencies to use secure applications for their various remote computing requirements.
“The government now realized that cloud infrastructure is as important as physical infrastructure,” Vibal Group President Gaspar A. Vibal said.
The Vibal Group, which has morphed from a publishing house to a digital-services company, partnered with global technology leaders Amazon Web Services, Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, Indra Philippines, Microsoft and Philcox Philippines to realize the multimillion-peso project.
GovCloud will use a hybrid-cloud strategy, which will integrate both private and public clouds.
The creation of a private in-country data center will ensure data security while the off-premise public cloud will make online information and services readily available to agencies.
The implementation of the GovCloud is pursuant to the adoption of the Cloud First Policy by state departments, offices and agencies to provide better services to citizens through the use of scalable and on-demand cloud computing.
“With GovCloud, together with the recently issued Cloud First Policy, we look forward to more agencies offering better services and information online,” Villorente said.
The policy aims to reduce costs in government by eliminating the duplication of hardware and systems, the fragmentation of databases, and the use of cloud-computing technology.
Cloud computing is a model for enabling universal, convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of computing resources—such as networks, servers, storage, applications and services—that can be rapidly released with minimal management interaction.
It “has brought a new and more efficient means of managing government information-technology resources”.