Free Custom «Cloud-Based Semi-Electronic Government Solution» Essay Paper

Many citizens and government employees are meeting a substantial obstacle in processing applications in a fast, smooth and convenient manner. The principal problem is the government bureaucracy. Despite the development and involvement of technology, government is yet to embrace the trend. Technological changes and development of new, efficient and affordable information systems are innovation which every citizen can afford to use. The introduction of cloud computing in the technology sector has improved the facilitation of efficient working relation between the government and its citizens.

Cloud computing is a convenient model which allows access on the demand to the network’s pool of configurable shared computing resources. These computing resources include networks, storage, applications, servers etc. The resources should be released and provisioned through interactions of the service provider used by the consumer although with minimized management.

The cloud computing has changed the industrial world as many organizations are benefiting from its usage since it reduces the amount of the operations occurred, increases productivity, creates more opportunities than before thus expanding the businesses. The main importance of cloud computing to business is the competition advantage where a business cuts the final costs of the products since the operations costs are cheaper. In conclusion, cloud computing offers cheaper services in information management and storage (Microsoft & Yamartino, 2010).

This project, therefore, embraces the technological changes and use of cloud computing to help the government in its function to serve the citizens in a convenient manner. The project designs and implements a portal where citizens can upload their applications. The solution will allow citizens to submit their applications, track the status on various levels of the government administrations. The application must be well formatted and encrypted in order to pass the government procedures before being submitted

The cloud- based system nature of the solution makes it circulate the citizens’ applications. This is to differentiate the government portals or government agents in cloud in order to increase the rate of review by the government employees. This method does not imply more work shouldered by the government agents creating better chances of serving the citizens better and faster.

The projects also entails the development of a citizen application viewer (CAV) that allows the employees of the government to retrieve, process, decrypt and interact with different applications as it is in the case of the annual procedures.

There are different measures developed to control and ensure the confidentiality, availability and integrity of citizens’ applications. These measures should be maintained through every stage of the processing cycle. They include the two key elements which underpin the e-government infrastructure. These are Digital signatures and a decentralized, secure data management system. Digital signature is a binding method which universally allows a citizen to append a signature to any legal document with notary power.

The enhancement of security in the solution package and the back up of the data makes it safe in terms of the confidentiality, availability of the citizen applications, as well as its integrity. Security is enhanced by protecting the access of information to unauthorized stakeholders. The applications integrity safeguards the information from editing, corrupting of crucial data or deleting by a mistake.

There are many protective technical measures applied on the platform in mind of the fact that it is using the cloud computing. They include preventing and filtering the attempts to stop the service, updating the security software for managing and configuring the operating system. Security experts need to monitor the system and the prevention of physical access to the data centers also limits the security threats (Valeri, et al. 2011). Replication of data to more than one location will help the reallocation of the resources fast and reliably when attacked.

The citizens who submit the application to the platform will also be notified on the status of their application sent. This is to make the citizens updated and know what is going on with their requests. The system sends notifications to the citizens by either the phone or email depending on their wish. This is to show trust as one will track his or her application and can ask a question if it fails to go through a certain administrative level.

The users will benefit from the solution’s installation and implementation. The benefits include the reduction of costs for buying the computer; no need of the high powered machine to run the applications in the cloud. The applications will be placed specifically on the cloud or in the Internet space and will no longer need the space of the hard disk or the processing power. This makes the purchasing costs to meet the requirements cheaper. Also, there are many free applications which makes it comparatively cheaper solution compared to the traditional method where one must purchase a software required.

There are different requirements, which must be available for the solution to be implemented well. There must be fully networked computing station, with stable Internet and cloud computing services subscribed. A web server, server-side scripting language and an expert to work on it, Java scripting language and an e-mail client are a necessity to start working on cloud. All these hardware and software solutions act as a framework for the solution to work effectively and with reliability.

In making the government agencies more efficient and reliable, administrative processes should be clearly divided into personal and non-personal data due to privacy. An example is managing the applications sent by the citizens to the government. The citizens can first submit the application to the application management service provider, than run in a community or private cloud in order to secure the personal data in the application. Then the application is delivered to the responsible public authority in an anonymous way. The government agency does not need to know the identity of the issuer of the application in order to perform their duties. This means that the government agency can run the processes in the public cloud infrastructures.

To summarize this idea, the cloud solution provides a secure storage services for applications and simplifies the interaction between the government administrations and citizens. This is done by optimizing the governmental processes in improving the cross administration stages through exchange of the applications or documents. Citizens own the safes of the electronic documents which store and manage the applications or documents. Citizens can also choose to grant accessibility permissions to government agencies for administrative procedures (Hustinx, 2010).

To enhance the security of the data, thorough authentications and encryptions of the citizens accessing the documents in the cloud should be made. The application management service provider can then be organized to collaborate with several data centers with a dedication of resources. A cloud computing is, therefore, used to manage the dedicated resources.

In conclusion, the project aims at improving the work of government in order to serve the citizens in an efficient and reliable manner. The solution also aims at improving the data retrieval and accessibility speed of citizen’s data as the information is stored in the cloud. The authorized user can use the data any time at anywhere.

The solution mostly aims to enhance the working standards of the government by improving the employees’ productivity since there are no cases of system failures. Also, there are more available solutions in the cloud which the government agencies can use when they need or can duplicate different services, which cannot be shared with the public (Macleod, 2011).