“Cloud Based Framework for E-Governance” | Original Article

ABSTRACT:

Today almost every country in the world has developed and implemented e-government system in some form or another in order to improve the performance of public sector organizations. The key idea behind the e-government is to provide public services to citizens and businesses efficiently and effectively. The effectiveness and efficiency can be increased further if governments make good use of new and modern computing technologies like service oriented architecture (SOA). Cloud computing is the realization of the service oriented architecture which is the direct outcome of research in virtualization, utility computing distributed computing, grid computing, content outsourcing and web 2.0. The performance of cloud based e-government systems is better than the traditional e-government systems. The cloud based e-government provides several benefits over the traditional e-government. Since information and applications are hosted online in cloud computing that is why they are available and accessible from anywhere and at any time. In the light of current economic situation where governments around the world are under pressure to cut extra spending and they are shrinking the ICT budget as well. In this situation cloud based e-government is a good option in which governments do not need to purchase ICT equipment. In fact they lease ICT resources and services according to their need instead of investing huge amount of money in buying equipment. In short, capital costs are replaced by operational costs for the resources used by government organizations. Trust and security are also playing an important role in the success of e-government. One of the important stakeholders of the e-government is the citizens therefore they should have trust in e-government systems. In cloud computing data is stored and processed at third party premises therefore citizens and businesses are concerned about the confidentiality and security of their sensitive data and information. Similarly data leakage can also affect the trust of citizens and businesses because in some cases the data loss can be irreplaceable. But still the cloud based e-government system is providing more benefits in the form of efficiency, scalability, flexibility and cost effectiveness as compared to traditional e-government system.