IfG.CC - The Potsdam eGovernment Competence Center

Whatever you think about the budget cuts that are now affecting public sector organisations, there is no denying that they will fundamentally affect how IT services are thought about. How can the public sector address the new drives for efficiency and cost savings, yet at the same time manage its own position with the threat of lost skills, staff and spending power? What is certain is that new models for delivering IT have to be considered.

Cloud Computing has already been pushed forward as the panacea for today’s IT infrastructure problems: instead of running separate services and data centres to meet the same requirements, everything should be centralised, computing capacity and server resources should be pooled and then consumed on a “pay as you go” basis.

Read more: Cloud, shared services and the public sector

When the topic of cloud computing comes up in interviews and conferences, the general theme is one of caution: the cloud isn’t or mightn’t be secure enough; there might be interoperability issues; the Service Level Agreements (SLA) are not satisfactory… it goes on.

The same issues come up again and again — with government officials, educators and industry practitioners alike.

And all of the concerns are legitimate, when you consider the value of the data we are talking about moving to the mysterious cloud, particularly from a government perspective. Yet caution has been taken to such an extent that we can forget that it has been around — and has been used by all internet users — for years.

Read more: Cloud: A question of trust?

Healthcare has been slower than most industries to embrace cloud computing, but that's starting to change.

The cloud is destined to play a much larger role in healthcare than it has so far. That will be especially true as more providers adopt e-health records and other digitized clinical systems. It will also be pushed along by storage-hungry systems like 3-D medical imaging and health information exchanges looking to provide more efficient ways to share data.

Healthcare has been slower to embrace cloud models than other industries. The reasons for this range from security concerns to a heavy reliance on paper that has kept many hospitals and medical practices from moving quickly to electronic systems.

Read more: Healthcare Heads Toward The Cloud

OpenNebula, an open-source project aimed at building the industry standard open source cloud computing tool for managing distributed data center infrastructures, released Version 2.0 of its OpenNebula Toolkit for cloud computing.

The newly released toolkit is an offshoot of close collaboration with Leading IT Organizations that have used OpenNebula to build large-scale production cloud infrastructures in industry and academia. As a result, the toolkit includes features that many enterprise IT organizations need for private and hybrid cloud adoption.

Read more: OpenNebula's Toolkit Helps Tackle Challenges in the Cloud