IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - Spring 2013 - 72

regulations making it not so attractive for cloud providers.
The savings from implementing cloud computing could come
by finding economies of scale in
ICT and sharing resources between
different public organizations. The
decision to go for cloud solutions
should be taken from a strategic
point of view, taking into account
long-term strategies and technologies. There should always be an exit
strategy, in case it should become
necessary to move services in-house
or to a different provider.
Considering the different cloud
models and deployment strategies,
there is not a clear conclusion that
any one model is most appropriate
and in most cases a combination
of them, one having greater prevalence, is likely to be appropriate.
The community model is especially
interesting for public organizations.
Sharing resources implies fewer and
bigger data centres as is happening
now in the private sector. There will
be new government services from
different cloud providers, like Govcloud from Amazon for Europe. It
is important that clear standards and
strategies are defined at the highest
possible level for outsourcing and
use of cloud services. Organizations
must make sure they have enough
technical expertise to evaluate and
manage the solution. Enterprise
architects and contract managers
with the ability to understand complex pricing plans and technologies
will be required. procurement procedures will need to evolve to deal
with cloud utility services.
The main indirect benefits of
the use of cloud services in public
organizations will come from the
use of app stores and social media.
The first will permit re-use of

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software and services, mainly when
using SaaS and paaS, permitting
rapid deployment of new functionality. The use of social media and
collaboration directly with users
could permit a new paradigm in the
way the public services are used
by the public, allowing users to
add and manipulate data and even
applications that will use the data,
shifting the power of manipulating
and managing data to users directly.
In order to accomplish this
change successfully it is very important that public bodies work together
with providers [12] defining proper
standards and services that meet
the requirements of public bodies
[13]. Examples of this are starting to happen in countries like the
United States. Especially in times of
cost reduction and austerity, moving
more services and applications to
cloud models seems very attractive,
but this could be traumatic if not
done properly.
However, if done with care, it
could reduce cost, permit public
organizations to re-focus their efforts,
add new functionality and provide
a better service for both the public
organization and citizens.

Author Information
Oscar Diez is the Head of
Datacentre, European Medicines
Agency (EMA), 7 Westferry Circus,
E14 4HB, London; Email: oscar.
diez@ema.europa.eu.
Andres Silva is with the Facultad
de Informatica, Universidad politécnica de Madrid, 28660 Boadilla
del Monte (Madrid), Spain; Email:
asilva@fi.upm.es.
The views expressed in this
article are the personal views of
the author(s) and may not be understood or quoted as being made on

behalf of or reflecting the position of the European Medicines
Agency or one of its committees or
working parties.

References

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