E-Government in the Public Cloud: Requirements and Opportunities

Cloud computing promises various advantages compared to classical provisioning models and is therefore highly interesting for e-Government services. For security and data protection reasons, adoption of cloud computing in public sectors has focused on private or community clouds so far, underusing the great potential of public clouds. In this article, we tackle this issue and show opportunities to unleash the full potential of public clouds also to the public sector. First, we perform a thorough literature survey to identify a comprehensive set of requirements for e-Government services in public cloud environments. Then, we assess cloud-related technologies and propose strategies to satisfy these identified requirements, providing decision makers from the public sector a comprehensive overview that helps during design, migration, and development of e-Government service to be deployed in public clouds.