The Portuguese government cloud services, deployment and management framework

Resumo

In the context of shared services implementation within the Portuguese public administration a new initiative named Governmental Open Cloud (GO-Cloud) has emerged. The GO-Cloud initiative implementation overlays the double objective of establishing a technological platform that will leverage the shared services adoption spreading among public administration entities, concerning both the already deployed financial and budgetary management solution and the shared human resource management solution, and the provisioning of ICT resources and services in a more flexible and effective way. The Portuguese shared services solution is based on a service oriented architecture which facilitates the adoption and integration of the cloud computing paradigm and the relating short term expected economical and structural benefits concerning both governmental efficiency and effectiveness. Two of the major risks concerning GO-Cloud are the relative lack of maturity of cloud computing technology and standards as well as the cultural and organizational change it introduces within public administration universe of more than 510000 employees. In order to properly deal with these threats two initiatives have been taken: (i) at the technical level to build an open cloud based on existing technologies and interconnection standards; (ii) at the management level to develop a governance model able to address and support its implementation, development and management. This paper focuses in both aspects: the GO-Cloud services architecture and its respective deployment and governance models. The deployment model is inspired in the web services paradigm and the management model deploys the Shared Services Analysis Model (SSAM) to the cloud in a three layer management approach (strategy, business and operation).