Government Chief Information Officer, Colin MacDonald, says,‘’This new service is an important building block in a suite of product offerings that will soon be available – all intended to simplify ICT management in government agencies, help them work together, and make them more efficient and effective.”
“Agencies can focus on creating more services that customers want and expect, rather than having to worry about owning, operating and maintaining large amounts of ICT infrastructure .”
New Zealand company Datacom, and global suppliers Dimension Data and Fujitsu have been awarded contracts for the cloud-based Desktop as a Service (DaaS). They will take on the management of the agencies’ desktop operating systems and software applications.
“This means agencies don’t have to buy, build, install and operate computer hardware and software. Instead they can purchase it as a service and access it through the Internet, paying only for what they use, like a utility. Agencies can scale up or down as it suits them,” explains MacDonald.
“DaaS will help make government workplaces more flexible by enabling people to access their own desktop from different locations, rather than being tied to their own computer,” he says. “This will make a big difference to the ability of government agencies to work together to deliver better public services.”
Although initial purchase prices may be similar to current costs, agencies will be able to cut down on procurement expenses as they will no longer need to tender these services and will benefit from economies of scale through volume discounts over time.
Five agencies are ready to take up DaaS as soon as it becomes available and eight more are close behind, bringing 30,000 computers under the service currently.
Other cloud-based services that will becoming available in the next few months is a document and records management service that will make it easier for agencies to access and use information that they hold. It will also serve as an office productivity tool that will standardise the approach to email and calendars.
These projects are in line with the Government ICT Strategy and Action Plan to 2017 set out in June to simplify the government’s approach to ICT management within its agencies. “This is all part of the government’s drive to achieve ICT-enabled better public services,” noted MacDonald.
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Autor(en)/Author(s): Medha Basu
Quelle/Source: futureGov, 07.11.2013
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