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Central Government, Policy

Thailand hatches plan for private cloud

By Robin Hicks | 25 May 2009

The government of Thailand is planning to set up a cloud computing platform as part of efforts to improve the development and implementation of e-government applications.

Thailand’s private cloud aims to help small- and medium-sized government agencies with limited budgets to embrace e-government more quickly, without the need to access software-as-a-service via the internet.

The cloud will be managed by Thailand’s Government Information Technology Service (GITS) and is expected to go live next year.

The first application procured via the cloud will be government email: @mail.go.th. GITS Director Sak Segkhoonthod said: “There are currently about 30,000 e-mail accounts and we aim to reach 100,000 accounts next calendar year; and a booking service for governmental facilities. These applications are now digitised, but are deployed separately in each of more than 200 government departments.”

He added: “We will move these duplicated similar applications from the different servers into one server, to be shared and used by a group of government departments. It will considerably reduce costs.”

The move is part of GITS’s 2010 mission to transform itself into an IT service provider based on service-level agreements, and to enable government departments to achieve the goals of the e-government master plan by the end of 2014.

By that time, Thailand is expected to have delivered an “intelligent e-government”.

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