European, Mediterranean & Middle Eastern Conference on Information Systems 2011 (EMCIS2011) May 30-31 2011, Athens, Greece

CLOUD COMPUTING AND EGOVERNMENT: A LITERATURE REVIEW

Charalampos Tsaravas, Department of Digital Systems, University of Piraeus, Greece xtsarava@unipi.gr Marinos Themistocleous, Department of Digital Systems, University of Piraeus, Greece, mthemist@unipi.gr University of Coimbra, marinos@dei.uc.pt

Abstract
With the rapid evolution of Information Communication Technology (ICT) governments, organizations and businesses are looking for solutions to improve their services and integrate their IT infrastructures. In recent years, advanced technologies have been evolved to address integration problems. Recent technological trends such as Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) and cloud computing support these efforts. Despite that there is a plenty of research studies related to SOA, there is limited literature on: a) the application of SOA in an electronic government (e-government) and b) the use of cloud computing in public sector. Thus, our research focuses on the area of cloud computing in conjunction with e-government environment. In this paper, we analyse the normative literature on Cloud computing. In addition we analyse case studies in which cloud computing has been used by various government organizations. Keywords: E-Government, Cloud Computing, Public Sector, Case Studies

INTRODUCTION

Information Technology (IT) is being increasingly used as a key tool to automate business processes at all level. In spite of this, current information systems within government organisations have not been developed in a coordinated way. As a result, the majority of organizations IT infrastructure consists of autonomous and sometimes heterogeneous solutions that are often unable to meet the needs of the organization. Thus, a variety of integration problems has been derived from this effect while applications can not cooperate and incongruent IT solutions cannot be integrated together (Corbitt and Themistocleous, 2011; Soja et al., 2011). he global economic recession and the shrinking budget of IT projects have led to the need of development of integrated information systems at a lower cost. European Commission (through Europe 2020 Strategy-Digital Agenda) and Unite States are looking forward to meet this need. Today, the emergent phenomenon of cloud computing aims at transforming the traditional way of computing, by providing both software applications and hardware resources as a service. Thus, government agencies, businesses and/or individuals can either provide or use services within a near limitless computing environment (storage, CPU power etc). Specifically in governments, the adoption of ICT in public domain has become the main focus of governmental reforms and has been recognized as a strategic tool to enable these reforms in public sector (Charalabidis et al., 2010). Governments that are looking for answers against bureaucracy and complication of procedures are almost obligated to implement new technological solutions to provide public services effectively. According to Ebrahim and Irani (2005) one of the most important barrier for the adoption of e-government is the existing inadequate IT infrastructure. Particularly, the lack of: (a) integrated information systems across government organizations and (b) the interoperability of their legacy systems prevent the development of easily accessible, cost-effective and reliable electronic services. Moreover, due to the complexity of e-government processes and its obvious needs

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for massive data record and monitoring, a secure and powerful infrastructure is vital (Charalabidis et al., 2011; Soja et al., 2011). An example of this , a fire and weather forecasting system, which has been recently developed in Greece and relies on continuously collection and analysis of geographical data, requires massive processing power and storage capacity, in order to execute complex calculations derived from specific models. In order to address these challenges, advanced technologies trends in this area such as Service Oriented Architecture and cloud computing may be an effective manner for the development of integrated information systems (Cellary and Strykowski, 2009). Thus, SOA, computer power and IT infrastructures which will offer software as a service should be taken into consideration in order to attain automated and optimized processes (Kamal et al., 2008). However, cloud computing research is still in its infancy. Therefore, questions related to its reliability and effectiveness are raised. This indicates that there is a need for further research on cloud computing and its collaboration with SOA in an e-government environment. Due to the absence of published works related to e-government and Cloud computing, in this article we will summarize some case studies of cloud computing implementation in e-government environment. The remainder of this paper is organised as follows: Section 2 introduces cloud computing providing a brief review of normative literature on this research field. The purpose of this section is to explain what cloud computing really is and from what is consisted of. Thereafter, a discussion on: (a) the benefits and obstacles, (b) service models and (c) deployment models of cloud computing is carried out. Section 3 summarizes and discusses different case studies within government organizations. The purpose of this section is to highlight the benefits and limitations that derived from the migration of government services to the cloud. The paper closes with conclusions and future research issues.

2
2.1

INTRODUCING CLOUD COMPUTING

What is Cloud Computing?

The vision of Cloud Computing is not new compared to the rapid development of information technology. In 1961, a pioneer in computer science John McCarthy had predicted that someday the computational power will be offered as a public service, such as water and electricity. This concept, however, declined in early 1970's, due to the lack of physical infrastructure that would satisfy the needs of Cloud technology implementation. In spite of this, the real development of this model is nowadays in its infancy and computing as a utility seems to be the latest trend which attracts the attention of IT professionals and researchers. The concept of providing everything-as-a-service (X-asa-Service) is being reflected in the buzzword: Cloud computing. Armbrust et al., (2009) define that: Cloud computing refers to both applications delivered as services over the Internet and the hardware and systems software in the datacenters that provide those services (Armbrust et al., 2009) Thus, cloud computing provides a pool of highly scalable and easily accessible virtualized resources (such as hardware, development platforms and/or services) capable of hosting end-user applications exploited in a pay-as-you-go model. Datacenters in which these services are hosted, are sets of interconnected servers which generate huge computing power and virtualized environment that allows the dynamically deployment of applications at run-time. cloud computing involves the following three basic components: Clients: Clients and their needs remain the same as in a common Local Area Network (LAN). They may use desktop computers, laptops, tablet computers or other mobile devices, to access internet data or services. Datacenter: The datacenter is a set of servers where the requested applications are hosted. The growing trend in IT, servers virtualizing, facilitate multiple virtual servers to run on one

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physical server. The number of virtual servers that can run on a physical server depends on its size and speed and on the nature of the applications will be running on the virtual server. Distributed servers: The structure of cloud computing allows cloud providers to host physical servers in disparate geographical locations without affecting the interaction of cloud end-users. This increases the flexibility and security options of the service provider. In case of a problem in a datacenter, a service will be still accessible through another distributed server. In addition, in case that cloud needs more hardware devices to support its workload, it is not necessary to attach more servers onto the primary datacenter but can be set up at another group of distributed servers and to be automatically embedded to the cloud. These are illustrated in Figure 1.
Instances Instances Instances

Request Clients Response

Request

X-as-a-Service
Distributed Servers

Services

Development Tools

Hardware Resources

Datacenters

Figure 1: cloud computing topology

The whole infrastructure can be deployed in multiple ways. It depends on the nature of applications and the way that cloud is built. This is one of the key benefits for using cloud. It is useful when servers needs are massive. It can also help organisations when they just want a spoonful of CPU power (Velte et al., 2010). The advent of cloud computing brings a fresh air in IT departments of governments and enterprises. There are many advantages for their operation but they also have to address some important barriers erected in order to successfully migrate to the cloud. Benefits and barriers of cloud computing are discussed in the following section. 2.2 Benefits and Obstacles

cloud computing includes a variety of technologies and platforms such as SOA and Web Services (Tsai et al., 2010; Wang et al., 2010; Youseff et al., 2008). Some could argue that Cloud and SOA/Web Services share some barriers and benefits. Furthermore, SOA and Web Services characteristics, has been researched extensively, but is not the intention of this research to expand and incorporate them with cloud computing at this point. In our current research we focus on consolidating a foundation of knowledge on cloud computing. Our intention is to investigate SOA/Web Services issues in depth. Nevertheless, in an attempt to concentrate on cloud computing itself, an effort to present its benefits and barriers is made. Although cloud computing is still in its early stages technology and it is not yet widely adopted, some benefits of its implementation, that the public sector and government IT organizations are certain to want to take advantage of, has become apparent. Moving services, data and hardware resources onto Cloud (that is maintained by a third-party), organizations do not spend money on software installation and maintenance. Cloud also gives massive storage spaces in its virtual datacenters so a physical

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Distributed Servers

Distributed Servers

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storage centre is no longer needed. Implementation costs are reduced due to the pay-as-you-go model while end-users can access services or resources and be precisely charged for what the use. In addition, they are able to access data or services from anywhere they are, though the Internet. Furthermore, any potentially additional resource can be set up in very short time so organizations are flexible to scale up or down its IT infrastructure based on their needs. Finally, a significant environmental benefit derives from Cloud computing. Vendors datacenters are specifically designed to provide the considerable required energy to maintain and manage the hardware infrastructure. Thus, organizations dont need to host their own internal equipment, thereby saving on energy costs. However, research has shown that there are some major obstacles which hinder the adoption and growth of Cloud computing. As every technological concept, cloud computing is not an exception in terms of trust and security issues. Once data are outsourced to a third-party cloud provider, several concerns arise about security, availability and reliability of data. In addition, due to the lack of interoperability among the clouds of different vendors, users may not be able to easily transfer their data from one cloud to another (Data Lock-In). There are also some other technical and privacy obstacles concerning on network efficiency during a heavy data transfer workload, performance unpredictability of virtual machines and software licensing. Table 1 summarizes the extracted benefits and challenges of cloud computing.
Benefits Cost reduction (installation and maintenance) Massive storage capacity Reference (Bhardwaj et al., 2010) (Vaquero et al., 2009) Obstacles Availability of service Data Lock-In (Portability) Reference (Armbrust et al., 2009) (Armbrust et al., 2009; Russell et al., 2009) (Armbrust et al., 2009) (Armbrust et al., 2009) (Dikaiakos et al., 2009) (Armbrust et al., 2009; Dikaiakos et al., 2009)

Scalability Easily implemented (no hardware/software installation required) Accessibility/Mobility (accessible applications on-demand anywhere) Elasticity and pay-as-you-go

(Furht and Escalante, 2010) (Bhardwaj et al., 2010)

Reliability of data Data transfer bottlenecks

(Rastogi, 2010; Velte et al., 2010) (Rittinghouse and Ransome, 2010) (Briscoe and Marinos, 2009)

Performance unpredictability Software Licensing

Energy saving (Green datacenters)

Table 1: Cloud Computing Benefits and Obstacles

2.3

Service Models

cloud computing consists of three service models: a) Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), b) Software as a Service (SaaS) and c) Platform as a Service (PaaS). Built on the base of service model stack, IaaS layer provides the required hardware as a service. We could classify IaaS in two categories: Computation as a Service (CaaS) and Data as a Service (DaaS). In CaaS virtual servers are rented and billed per hour based on their capacities concerning on CPU power and memory RAM size, operation system and deployed software. A vast storage space is provided by DaaS, where end-users can store any type of data charged per gigabyte for data transfer and data size (Clemons and Chen, 2011; Tsai et al., 2010) . Platform as a Service (PaaS) is a pre-installed development platform providing a set of software and services that aids developers to design, deploy and test and monitor applications hosting on the cloud. This programming language integrated platform delivered as a service to developers over the Web. It facilitates development and deployment of applications without the cost and complexity of buying and

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managing the underlying infrastructure, providing all of the facilities required to support the complete life cycle of building and delivering web applications and services entirely (Bhardwaj et al., 2010; Furht and Escalante, 2010). Built on the top of services model stack, SaaS is based on the use of software or applications which are hosted and delivered to end-users as a service on-demand. This ondemand service delivery model eliminates users need for physical infrastructure and software licensing issues, since all these features are automatically provided and maintained by the cloud provider. Table 2, summarizes the layers of cloud computing providing their baseline characteristics and also demonstrates the most representative cloud computing industry examples (Dillion et al., 2010; Wang et al., 2010).
Layer Characteristics Examples

SaaS (Hosting and providing services)

PaaS (Development platform)

IaaS (Computing resources)

Avoidance of local install & run (Wang et al., 2010) Maintenance free (for user) (Wang et al., 2008) Reduced purchasing software cost (Clemons and Chen, 2011) Pay as-you-go Security based on SSL (Velte et al., 2010) Services and applications development (Foster et al., 2008) Hosts both completed and in-progress applications (Dillion et al., 2010) Supports development of web interfaces such as Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) and Representational State Transfer (REST) for mashups deployment (Velte et al., 2010) Processing power, Storage, Network (Sohan and Zeng, 2010) Virtualization (Bhardwaj et al., 2010)

Salesforce Netsuite Google Apps

Microsoft Azure Service Platform Saleforce - Force.com Google App Engine Amazon Relational Database Services and Rackspace Cloud Sites

Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) - EC2 (Elastic Cloud Computing) Rackspace Cloud Servers

Table 2: cloud computing Service Models

2.4

Deployment Models

Advocating considerations exist among cloud computing architects, researchers and practitioners regarding the elimination of standard enterprise application deployment model to the scaling up to a cloud computing based one. The heap of cloud computing can be formulated and carried out based on three different deployment models: a) private cloud, b) public cloud and c) hybrid cloud. In the private cloud, services are hosted and delivered strictly within a companys or organisations datacenter. Thus, the cloud infrastructure is operated solely for the organization that uses it and can be built on existing on-premises or off-premises. In addition, either the organization or a third party may be responsible for the clouds management in order to improve the scalability and utilization of local datacenters (Sohan and Zeng, 2010). In public cloud, services and resources are publicly available (online) to the end-users in pay-as-yougo manner; while they are manage by Cloud providers (vendors). Due to the essential feature of payment, Service Level Agreement (SLA) contracts are significantly important to be enforced. The

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virtualised resources may be controlled within a public cloud (e.g. virtual images, virtual machine instances) while at the same time is been taking full control over the local infrastructure. Hybrid cloud results from the combination of public and private cloud models. They contribute in providing on-demand, externally provisioned scale. Specifically, when the private cloud of an organisation cannot respond in to its sudden workflow changes, a public cloud can be used to address the increasing temporary tasks. However, this fact produces issues on how to distribute applications across both a public and private cloud.

CLOUD IN EGOV LOCAL AND FEDERAL CASE STUDIES

Although governments have been traditionally slow adopters of new technology (Rogers, 1995), cloud computing has become a really attractive mean of efficient and cost-effective service delivery to these across the word. The authors in an attempt to strengthen the issue of cloud computing use in an eGov perspective will present and analyse four case studies. The case studies summarized in this section show that government organisations like City of Miami, City of Edmonton, Federal Government and NASA adopted cloud computing solutions to improve their service delivery and to reduce their IT costs. City of Miami. The municipal government of City of Miami provides a variety of services to more than 425,000 citizens. The citys employees work in more than 80 locations and rely on a central IT department to provide cost-effective and reliable services. One provided service, is the nonemergency telephone line 311, which is used to record and track issues reported by citizens. As the budget of IT department was cut by 18%, the city sought to improve this service, by developing a Web version of it. The purpose of this concept was to enable citizens to report and track service requests online. However, mapping applications are processing-power intensive and the specialists of IT department were not sure whether their current infrastructure could support the required computing power of the new 311 application. In addition, they had to take into consideration infrastructure location issues due to the hurricane-prone nature of the region. To address these needs, the city of Miami contracted with Microsoft Corp. to host the 311 application on Windows Azure Platform. Thus, with almost unlimited computing power and in collaboration with an interactive mapping software provider (Microsoft Gold Certified Partner ISC), the City of Miami efficiently implemented the new 311 web application on the cloud. The entire hosting of service on to the cloud resulted in reduced IT costs, improved provided services to citizens and also in time-effective service delivery. Furthermore, it relies on a cost-effective disaster-recovery model, which is critical benefit in this hurricane-prone region (Rutrell, 2010). City of Edmonton. The City of Edmonton delivers services to more than 850,000 citizens. The Citys principle of acting more openly and transparently resulted in the provision of census data and other public information, online to citizens. The Citys council decided to set its open data on the Microsoft Open Government Data Initiative (OGDI) in order to improve the relationships among government organizations, businesses and citizens. OGDI is a set of software resources that allows developers and government agencies to share, access and/or interact with openly available data. At the early steps of this project, the City of Edmonton released 12 datasets available online. A variety of information was included such as: information about parks, schools, libraries, transit stops, city council meetings and other information. The datasets reached 38 in next few months that including new available data from other public agencies. Having its open data catalog migrated on to the Cloud, the IT department of the City of Edmonton deployed its solution fast and at a low cost. Thus, it enhanced the transparency, flexibility and services provided to citizens by municipal government (Microsoft, 2010). General Services Administration (GSA). USA.gov is the official web information portal of Federal Government. Citizens can access a huge variety of information and resources regarding on taxes, job vacancies, health, education, voting instructions and registrations and business guides. As this portal is the means of public interaction to access critical information, Government has often faced massive network traffic load during a day. As a result users suffered long delays and downtime and inefficient services. In order to address these spikes of traffic, GSAs officials considered migration of the current infrastructure in to Cloud as ideal solution. By moving to Terremarks Enterprise Cloud service, GSA

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was flexible to scale up or down its infrastructure on-demand, based on its needs. The migration to a Cloud-based infrastructure hosting environment (Terramarks IaaS platform), resulted in costs savings 72%. In addition, the infrastructure upgrade time reduced in maximum 24hours, from nine months with on-premises hosting. Furthermore, the two hour average downtime with the traditional infrastructure, reduced to near zero with the Cloud solution (Staten et al., 2009). National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). Pioneer in space exploration and aeronautics, NASA is the most crucial organization in scientific research. To the verge of technology development, NASA had to face an unprecedented need of safely storing massive volumes of crucial data. Furthermore, NASAs Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) aims to raise the interest of young people for space exploration, science development and technology engineering, through educational adn technology programs. Thus, NASA decided to launch the BeAMartian project in Windows Azure Platform, to engage the public in citizen science with social media and crowd-sourcing. A special customized API, offers to BeAMartians visitors access to 250,000 high quality pictures of Mars eliminating the need of storing any additional data in JPL machines. End-users are able to virtually explore the planet in an effective and fun way, by browsing pictures, watching videos, creating tags and posting questions and answers. As a result, NASA has successfully engaged international users to interact with a graphically rich environment that demand massive volume of data. JPLs project raised publics attention for Mars missions and research activities. Moreover, there have been 2.5 million API queries from NASA crowd-sourcing applications and 500,000 API queries from developers. The Town Hall area of the application, received over 40,000 votes which ranked visitors suggestions that have also helped NASA identify several features of the Martian surface. JPL can now successfully handle the volumes or received questions, answering them progressively based on which is the most popular (Viotti et al., 2010). Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board (RATB). The RATB was created by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) in February 2009, undertaking a web development as a means of publicly ensuring transparency, fraud and abuse. The new project called Recovery.gov, was focused on: a) providing easily accessible information to the public in terms of Recovery expenses, b) enabling citizens accountability for these spending, c) highlighting issues to publicly debate, d) offering transparent access to Recovery opportunities and e) revealing the impact of Recovery spending. At first, RATB used Amazon Web Services (AWS) solution for development, testing and monitoring. However, the RATB couldnt afford the maintenance cost of the on-premises infrastructure, therefore project promotes decided to completely host Recovery.gov on AWSs platform. On the second term of 2010, Recovery.gov had been moved in Amazons (EC2) Cloud environment. Amazons IaaS model provided full scalability to the project and balanced handling any potential network spikes due to its potential to add or shed resources as needed. Despite the cost savings in Boards budget, Cloudy Recovery.gov resulted in reliable storage of critical data and more efficient computer operations as well as improved security. Furthermore, o pen government and shared continuously updated data through GIS strengthened transparency procedures (Amazon, 2010). Table 3 summarizes the solutions and benefits of the case studies described above.

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Case study

Solution Microsoft Windows Azure Platform Bing Maps

City of Miami

City of Edmonton

Microsoft Open Government Data Initiative (OGDI) Terramark Enterprise Cloud

General Services Administration (GSA)

NASA

Microsoft Windows Azure Microsoft Silverlight

Benefits Reduced IT costs Improved services (to citizens) Time-effective services Cost-effective disaster recovery model Fast deployment Low cost Enhanced transparency Flexible and improved services Cost savings 72% Reduced upgrade time Reduced average downtime Citizens engagement with scientific activities Virtualized exploration of Mars Access to thousands highquality pictures Users interaction within a graphically rich environment (data intensive) Successful handling of massive volumes of queries Creation of a global audience Full scalability Balance network spikes Cost savings Reliable storage of critical data Strengthened transparency

Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board (RATB)

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)

Table 3: Case studies findings

CONCLUSION, LIMITATIONS AND FURTHER RESEARCH

Cloud computing is a latest technological paradigm in IT world, related to the delivery of computing as a service. Evidences from literature show that the use of cloud computing has significant advantages such as: a) cost reduction, b) great storage capacity, c) scalability, d) needless software installation and maintenance, e) accessibility of on-demand services or applications from anywhere, f) elasticity and pay-as-you-go model and g) energy saving. However, several limitations concerning on: a) availability of services, b) data lock-in risk, c) reliability of data, d) data transfer bottlenecks, e) performance unpredictability and f) software licensing, are raised. Nonetheless, our research focuses on the implementation of cloud computing in e-government environment. Since there is limited literature related to e-government and cloud computing, we have investigated published case studies on this area. Despite, cloud computing is still in its infancy, it has already become attractive to IT world delegators. Findings derived from those case studies have shown that cloud computing solutions in government organizations resulted in significant cost reductions, enhanced transparency, improved service delivery and expanded systems scalability. Furthermore, time-effective and convenient services were delivered to the public. Also, citizens participation has been enhanced especially in the case of NASA and City of Edmonton. These results validate the normative literature. In addition to this, since the core of e-government initiatives includes

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information exchange, processing and service delivery, cloud computing seems to be an effective means of the next generation systems integration. This research is still in its initial stages and it can be considered as a research in progress. Thus, based on the literature review, we are planning to formulate research questions and develop a conceptual model. The nature of the research questions and the model itself will guide us to select a suitable research methodology that will be used to test our model. Appropriate data collection methods will be employed to collect data. Then, the data analysis will be carried out to test our research model and findings in terms of the significance of the model will be derived.

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