Industry Focus Issue 05

ISSUE 04 | June 2014

industry focus A CNME supplement

government special

Get smart Technologies that enable the transition to smart government

Inside Cloud computing Top 10 tech trends eHosting DataFort

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Contents

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Raising the bar The government IT market is one of the largest vertical markets globally, and for good reason.

Governments are trying to get smart by being efficient and effective at what they do. Yasser Zeineldin, CEO of eHosting DataFort, gives us a lowdown on some of the key trends in the government sector.

Smart governing Gartner Identifies the Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for Smart Government.

Ready for cloud?

As government agencies gear up for a series of major IT transitions, a majority of government networks lack the capacity that will be required to meet the additional load that cloud computing, big data and other looming initiatives will entail.

09 Industry Focus

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interview

Raising the bar The government IT market is one of the largest vertical markets globally, and for good reason.

Governments are trying to get smart by being efficient and effective at what they do. Yasser Zeineldin, CEO of eHosting DataFort, gives us a lowdown on some of the key trends in the government sector.

W

hat are the key technology trends affecting the Middle Eastern governments now and in the coming years?

With over 25 million visitors expected to visit Dubai for the World Expo 2020, the event promises to be a major opportunity for business and IT development. In fact, it has opened up a number of avenues which will shape the technology trends in the region for the next few years.

While the city is already witnessing smart infrastructure being built based on the latest and cutting edge 4

Industry Focus

technology, the government now aspires to transform the Emirate into a smart city within the next three years. This would ensure better efficiency and an enhanced working environment for the tourists, international investors and new businesses during the Expo.

The announcement to transform the region into a smart city was made in 2013, leading to a boom in the technology sector. With the huge number of tourists and investors coming to the UAE, there will be a large influx of data, which will need greater infrastructure planning.

Businesses will have to manage this

large amount of information in the most organized way. To ensure the same, investing in additional storage and network capacity would be required.

The Qatar World Cup 2022 will open up similar avenues, as governments and companies continue to invest in IT solutions for smart city infrastructure development, effective data storage and backup systems.

There is also a push towards greater mobile enablement of government services which will further increase self-service utilization. Smartphones and tablets are becoming the key contact

point between citizens and government institutions. With the increased focus on mobility, there will be a positive impact on ICT spending especially in the areas of mobile security, CRM, geo-localisation software, mobile enterprise management (covering solutions for device management, application development, and application management), and mobile content management, among others.

All of this requires a strong backbone IT infrastructure which is secure and scalable. Hence, we will see increased investment in data centre hosting services and cloud infrastructure as a service which offers scalable infrastructure on demand at low operational costs enabling faster adoption of online and mobile services.

Maintaining the highest levels of IT security and ensuring relevant compliance and regulatory demands have become imperative technology requirements. Ensuring the availability of IT systems in case of any disaster is also becoming a key reason for investments in Disaster recovery and Business continuity. In fact, we are seeing a lot of demand for disaster recovery services from the government sector.

In summary I believe that the advancement of technology will take a new meaning in the near future as the UAE aims to transform into a major technological hub not just within the region, but at a global level.

How do you rate the level of innovation in the government vertical compared to others in the region?

According to the Global Information Technology Report 2013, the UAE

Yasser Zeineldin, CEO of eHosting DataFort

occupied the 25th position on the Network Readiness Index (NRI), achieving a rank of 5.07 out of 7. Aligning with the government’s economic diversification goals, there has been considerable deployment of ICT solutions within all segments and industries. The country’s e-government services rank 9th globally, and the increased uptake of mobile broadband subscription (49th) are responsible for the UAE’s upward mobility on this index. The nation’s enterprises have increased ICT spending in the areas of internet bandwidth and skills upgrading.

The UAE government verticals occupy a favourable position ahead of Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, ranking 29th, 31st and 62nd respectively on the NRI. According to the same report, Qatar remains competitive on the forefront of

Maintaining the highest levels of IT security and ensuring relevant compliance and regulatory demands have become imperative technology requirements.”

technological innovation in the region.

The Qatari government has steadily increased online services and solutions for the citizens over the last year, and has also garnered significant online participation from them. ICT verticals such as mobile broadband subscriptions have skyrocketed from 9.6 per cent in 2012 to 70.3 per cent in 2013.

Some verticals, however, continue to lag behind. The ICT investment within the oil and gas sector, for instance, occupies only 10.71 per cent of total ICT spending in the GCC region, whereas telecommunications (19.30 per cent) and banking and finance (14.83 per cent) have been quicker to adopt cuttingedge technology solutions. The array of innovations within tablets will cause the IT hardware growth to reduce by 1.5 per cent in 2014. Mobility appears to be the key focus in the UAE, with enterprises and businesses adopting Bring-Your-OwnDevices (BYOD), machine-to-machine, unified communications, and softwaredefined data centres in 2014.

The UAE government remains committed to expanding ICT expertise and sophistication in the GCC as a method of economic diversification and developing entrepreneurship.

Industry Focus

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interview

What kind of new technologies are transforming the way government enterprises and citizens interact with each other?

There are various innovations that are transforming the IT landscape today some examples include cloud computing, data centres, BYOD, personal clouds, and cloud integration mechanisms. Among these, cloud computing is the dominant technology which shapes the data and communication sphere for governments, enterprises and citizens. Due to the abundance of devices, making a shift to the cloud is necessary to integrate critical IT functions and enhance connectivity between people.

The regional government aims to adopt solutions for smart city development. The above technologies help integrate key transport and infrastructure systems, utilities, e-government services within aviation and immigration, healthcare and many more. Additionally, the creation of apps has facilitated the communication between governments and citizens on all these fronts.

These new technologies will not only help governments facilitate their internal operations, but will accelerate the pace of smart city development and adoption of government services online and on mobile devices.

We have seen a lot of interest from governments on hosting critical collaboration portals and other online portals on a virtualized / cloud platform.

As an example, eHDF has deployed a fully managed hosting environment for the UAE Ministry of Public Works’ e-project portal. This enables all departments within the ministry as well as external contractors to view the entire project

lifecycle in real time and ensures highly confidential tender and contracts data is safeguarded against any threats.

Are government entities looking at the managed services models to reduce costs and opex? What is driving the adoption?

Yes, government entities are looking at managed service models which are cost-efficient, reducing their overall IT spending in the long-run. Managed IT Services offer multiple benefits at a strategic, operational and financial level. In a 2012 study conducted by Frost &Sullivan, it was reported that the UAE’s overall managed services market would grow at a compound annual growth rate of 17% over the next five years.

The Government is spending a large amount on IT infrastructure development and a significant portion of that is being outsourced. Data center hosting firms are the backbone of this model and government entities are taking advantage of such services for quick deployment of IT resources, shared resource usage and Service level agreements (SLAs).

Managed Hosting Services offer customized services with the promise of 24/7 availability and support, thereby allowing governments to focus on their core operations. They are turning to managed service models to complement their in-house IT infrastructure management. eHDF, being a managed hosting and cloud infrastructure services provider, offers an array of managed services that enable government entities to outsource some or all of their IT infrastructure management. This includes servers, networks, storage, back-up and security, monitoring, etc which are all backed

The regional government aims to adopt solutions for smart city development. The above technologies help integrate key transport and infrastructure systems, utilities, e-government services within aviation and immigration, healthcare and many more.”

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Industry Focus

by SLAs required for high availability, reliability, security and redundancy.

What is your value proposition to the government sector here? eHDF has been in the managed hosting business since 2001 and is one of the oldest commercial Data Centre and Managed Hosting service providers in the region. Additionally, being a part of TECOM Investments (a member of Dubai Holding) our business has adequate backing and support to compete and thrive in the market.

Our work with the government sector over the years reflects their trust in our services and solutions. We have implemented complex and innovative cloud computing, managed services and disaster recovery projects for both government and private sector organizations. These implementations have attracted a number of highly esteemed and reputed clients in the government sector such as Dubai e-Government, Emirates e-Government and Ministry of Public Works to name a few.

Hosting in a data centre within the borders of the country to meet regulatory compliance requirements is a key concern for government entities and since our data centres are located in Dubai a lot of government entities prefer to work with us. Security of highly confidential citizen data and information is critical.

We are certified for ISO 9001, ISO 14001, ISO 18001, ISO 20001, ISO 27001 and BS 25999 certifications and our data centres meet all the security requirements for a Tier 3 data centre. eHDF’s 24/7 customer service and bi-lingual customer support team make us a preferred provider for enterprises and governments looking for managed services.

In addition, we also offer Private Cloud services which are highly secure and scalable, offering Government entities a fully managed Virtual Data Centre environment with a shared pool of compute capacity, storage and network.

We have developed multiple options comprising of various configurations both managed and unmanaged. We believe this will help realize the potential of cloud computing and help reduce the total cost of ownership of IT assets

analysis

Smart governing Gartner Identifies the Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for Smart Government

The Nexus of Forces, which is the convergence of four powerful forces: social, mobile, cloud and information, is driving innovation in the government sector, according to Gartner.

The 10 strategic technology trends for smart government include:

1

Personal Mobile Workplace Regardless of how well government IT organizations try to categorize the types of devices, applications and interaction styles by user role, they will inevitably miss the fact that on any device, personal use will creep into professional use. Government IT organizations may have an illusion of control by either providing and

managing those devices or issuing wellarticulated policies to allow and manage employee-owned devices. However, the reality is that employees, depending on demographics, personal preferences and pressure to improve performance, can decide how much they want to use corporate information and applications versus personal information and applications.

2

Mobile Citizen Engagement Several inquiries with Gartner government clients reveal an interest in providing citizen-facing services using mobile devices, as well as leveraging social software functionalities. This interest is driven by a combination of pressure

coming from the political leadership and from opportunities that new technologies present. The suitability of government services to be delivered over a mobile channel depends on a combination of demographics, frequency and recurrence of use, immediacy and urgency of use, potential level of automation, relevance of location information for service delivery, and how compelling the use of the service is.

3

Big Data and Actionable Analytics Big data continues to present government with information management and processing issues that exceed the capability of traditional IT to support the use of information assets.

Industry Focus

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Analysis Existing practices that selectively evaluate which data should be integrated are being challenged by the realization that all data can be integrated with technologies that are specifically developed to do so. The adoption of big data concepts and initiatives in the public sector varies widely among jurisdictions and, to date, is limited to specific use cases such as fraud, waste and abuse detection; enhanced security capabilities; public health surveillance; healthcare management; or combining data from IT and operational technology (OT) applications to enhance security monitoring or increase situational awareness. Governments are searching for ways to use big data to gain business process efficiencies and reduce costs, but are having limited success.

4

Cost Effective Open Data Many tend to equate open data with public data, However data can be defined as open when it is machine-readable and is accessible through an API. This can apply to potentially any data that needs to be processed: whether it be public, discoverable through Freedom of Information Act requests, or restricted for use by a particulat government agency This leads to new ways of mashing up data coming from different sources as well as the ability to build new services and processes based on open data.

Governments become both providers of open data to each other and to the public at large (the latter just for public data) and consumers of open data coming from other parts of government as well as from businesses, NGOs and citizen communities.

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Citizen Managed Data Citizen data vaults are services that provide data subjects with the ability to access their data outside the context of a particular government transaction, allowing them much-finergrained control over when and how data can be accessed, and by whom, within the relevant legal framework that they are subject to. Citizen data vaults offer significant potential benefits in meeting Internet users’ evolving expectations, providing more transparent control of individual privacy rights on electronic data, easing the task of integrating different government services, and creating conditions for the creation of value-added services from commercial, nonprofit and peer-to-peer organizations (such as social 8

Industry Focus

networks). On the other hand, there are significant challenges to overcome, such as interoperability, latency issues, data availability and reliability, credibility and security issues, and the size and complexity of healthcare and other target areas.

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Hybrid IT and Cloud Governments worldwide continue to pursue both public and private types of cloud services, but the focus is shifting from developing internal cloud services to allowing agencies to purchase commercially provided but governmentally restricted services. For example, government clouds from vendors such as Google and Microsoft have shifted email service in a number of agencies from public to government clouds. Meanwhile, more-open public clouds are being emphasized in several countries mostly for non-critical CRM-like applications. The main objectives pushing cloud adoption have been cost reduction, speed of procurement and deployment, and responsiveness to regulations and needs for cost cutting. The public cloud is also gaining momentum as governments seek savings via consolidated procurement.

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Internet of Things The Internet is expanding beyond PCs and mobile devices into enterprise assets such as field equipment, and consumer items such as cars and televisions. Governments, as well as most enterprises and technology vendors, have yet to explore the possibilities of an expanded Internet and are not operationally or organizationally ready.

Smart city plans in several jurisdictions aim at exploring the ability to process huge masses of data coming from devices such as video cameras, parking sensors, air quality monitors and so forth to help local governments achieve goals in terms of increased public safety, improved environment, better quality of life.

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Cross Domain Interoperability Smart government initiatives depend on interoperable information, data obtained from external as well as internal sources, and processing and delivery networks that effectively integrate planning, performance analysis and business operations. To obtain economies of scale, governments have long sought to standardize and consolidate assets and processes. To date, the results have been

mixed. Whole-of-government enterprise architecture programs have often failed to maintain momentum over budget cycles or changes in administration. It is important to focus on scalable interoperability, a “just enough” approach to standards and architecture that delivers immediate business value as measured by narrowly defined, high-priority use cases.

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BPM for Case Management There isn’t one market for case management because all cases are not the same. Gartner distinguishes two types of cases. In decision-centric cases, the purpose of the work effort is to make a decision about rights, entitlements, payments, enrollment, priorities, risk or some other high-impact outcome.

In investigative cases, the outcome is uncertain; the purpose of the work effort is to identify interaction patterns among data. When the case is created, it often has very little data and structure. As the investigation progresses, data is added and patterns begin to appear. Fraud detection and criminal investigations are leading examples of this type. Both decisioncentric and investigative cases have a heavy dependence on semi-structured and unstructured information. Two dimensions — workflow and data type — have brought BPMS and ECM vendors into this emerging market.

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Gamification for Engagement Gamification can be used by government to motivate interactions with citizens or to achieve more meaningful levels of engagement with employees. Humans are “hard-wired” to enjoy games and have a natural tendency to engage when interactions are framed in a game construct. Gamification for government services, applications and processes can increase user interactivity and change behavior, resulting in greater engagement. Citizens or employees who can have fun are more likely to change behavior, for example, NASA Moonbase Alpha simulates lunar exploration to stimulate teamwork by using a variety of tools, including a lunar rover.

However, governments planning to leverage gamification must clearly understand the target audience they intend to engage, what behaviors they want to change, what motivates the audience and maintains their engagement, and how success will be measured.

insight

Ready for cloud?

As government agencies gear up for a series of major IT transitions, a majority of government networks lack the capacity that will be required to meet the additional load that cloud computing, big data and other looming initiatives will entail.

H

igh among the barriers to the adoption of cloud computing in the government sector, right alongside concerns over security and cross-border issues, is a general confusion about what, exactly, the cloud means.

“Cloud is well-defined,” says Robert Holleyman, president and CEO of the software trade group Industry Focus

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insight

BSA. “But cloud is not well understood among policymakers.”

Cloud computing has been a hot topic among CIOs and their staffers in recent years, and the government agencies are starting to prioritize cloudbased solutions as they roll out new IT initiatives.

But for the cloud to be broadly understood as more than a buzzword outside of IT circles, advocates of the technology should focus on the benefits that cloud computing can provide, particularly for cash-strapped government agencies working under shrinking budgets.

“It’s important that we start with mission areas that are affected by cloud, as opposed to technology, because at the end of the day it’s how cloud can ... be more efficient to help in different types of mission areas both for the government and for society,” says Dan Chenok, executive director of IBM’s Center for the Business of Government.

Where is cloud computing heading in 2014?

Private and hybrid cloud models, IT departments acting as cloud brokers, more competition among providers and a maturity in services is where ‘as-aservice’ computing is heading in 2014, say analysts.

Michael Warrilow, research director at Gartner, says more enterprises will look to use public and hybrid cloud models next year as they realise “it’s impossible to private cloud everything”.

“We will see ever-more public cloud adoption ... public [cloud] is probably going to be 70 to 80 per cent of cloud workloads,” he says.

“It is hard work to private cloud everything. You have got to be like a cloud provider but you have also got to be like traditional IT as well. So you have got to do security, service delivery, etc. People will be too ambitious. We think they should only target private cloud for the most important and relevant workloads.”

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Industry Focus

Telsyte analyst Rodney Gedda also says the hybrid model will take off next year as it alleviates the need for IT groups to manage their company’s entire IT infrastructure.

“The hybrid model will still play for a lot of enterprises. Most enterprises are still deploying infrastructure on premise and have existing investment on premise. So being able to augment that a bit better is what we will see in 2014.”

Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and platform-as-a-service (PaaS) adoption is expected to increase next

no longer have it largely to themselves ... Microsoft is shaping up as one of the most competitive threats to Amazon globally,” he says.

Telsyte’s Gedda adds that we can expect to see security and privacy as a key theme around the cloud next year.

He says it won’t be a deal breaker, but organisations will certainly look at keeping their sensitive data onshore under Australian jurisdictions.

2014 will also bring about a mobilecloud paradigm, where cloud services are managed via mobile devices, Gedda says.

“I think the ability to take control

The hybrid model will still play for a lot of enterprises. Most enterprises are still deploying infrastructure on premise and have existing investment on premise. So being able to augment that a bit better is what we will see in 2014.” year, says IBRS advisor Wissam Raffoul.

Companies will use software-as-a-service providers for their standard applications such as email, while IaaS will be used for legacy applications, he says.

He adds that as more IT organisations shift to the public and hybrid cloud model, they will need to enforce strict governance when negotiating contracts, and selecting and managing multiple providers.

Warrilow says there’s a trend where IT departments act as brokers of cloud services, which will continue through to next year.

“IT departments become less of the provider and more of the broker.

Amazon, for example, really doesn’t want to do that; they don’t really want to talk to people, they want to take credit cards and deliver low cost infrastructure. So they are not really in the managed services business,” he says.

Warrilow adds that competition between Microsoft and Amazon Web services will be fierce this year.

“2014 will be the year Amazon will

of cloud services from any device is something that will mature in 2014, become more of a mainstream thing.”

Tim Sheedy, Forrester analyst, says the good thing for CIOs next year is that cloud offerings will finally start to really mean cloud and not another version of outsourcing. So instead of having to sign up to three- to five-year contracts, more providers will mature their services and allow for flexibility in scaling up and down, he said.

“That’s one of the issues of cloud in the past where this term ‘cloud washing’, where we are not going to use the world hosting anymore, we are going to use the word cloud,” he says.

“So with service providers starting to move towards what is truly a cloudbased service I think there will be more trust in the term which means as an IT shop you know what you are going to get.

“Your cost could go down if your usage goes down, which is ultimately -- from an infrastructure, back end perspective -- is what you are looking for.”

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