Shareef Shareef
disruptive manner( Marston et. al. 2011). The conventional in‐house design and evolvment of IT will require an integrated cloud computing component as one of the important choices. The security checklist would cover all facets of security necessities such as; legal issue, policy issue, physical security, and technical issues( ENISA, 2009). The current literature( Huff & Munro, 2008) on technology adoption and particularly moving to grid computing( Lin & Lin, 2006), would offer a useful opportunity as a starting point. Government authority and researchers can take an empirical approach to investigate for a gradual adoption of cloud computing, and develop econometric models to recognise the strength of the relationship between relevant variables of interest. Organisations can also look for best practices for developing the cloud applications with their existing applications. For those applications that cannot be currently transferred to a cloud, organisations will still benefit from empirical research that overview the best solutions that can be set as a benchmark.
Reliability:
Cloud computing might not be suitable for all organisations. For instance, large companies might not be able to adopt cloud computing due to loss of services as a result of cloud glitches would be a significant threat. Especially if it affects their customers and hence considerable loss of sale opportunities and customer dissatisfaction. The issue of reliability in the context of cloud will continue to be a concern. Similar issues that occurred with the cloud services of Amazon and Google are possible to surface again as the number of cloud consumer and providers rise. The sudden unavailability of service outage, i. e. salesforce. com left consumers without services for six hours in February 2008. Amazon’ simple storage service( S3) and Elastic compute cloud suffered a three hour outage in the same month a few days later and an eight hour outage in July of the same year by S3( Leavitt, 2009). In addition, in the early 2009, Googles’ Gmail went down for three hours, hence stopping its 113 million consumers from accessing their emails or the documents which they are stored online as Google Docs( Naughton, 2009). However, Amazon tried to address these issues, but still the adoption of cloud computing raises various challenges and need to be taken into consideration. Despite these challenges, recently large companies( such as Sanmina‐SCI which has a revenue of 10.7 billion US dollars, which uses Googles Apps) were more interested than small companies in leveraging IaaS external cloud capability( Golden, 2009).
3. Methodology
To accomplish this study, the researcher conducted qualitative interviews with four highly position people in ministries of KRI, who were carefully selected, based on their respective experience and knowledge in their own area of expertise such as IT. The ministries were selected are; ministry of municipalities, ministry of transportation and communication, ministry of higher education and scientific research, and the IT department at the council of ministries. These interviews were conducted in order to identify and outline the current state of affairs of the region in terms of the technology used for service provision. Each participant based on his experience identified the current situation in the region in terms of ICT. They also had their own view of the possibility of the adoption of cloud computing in the e ‐ government system.
4. Cloud computing and e‐Government
Numerous countries across the world have tried to employ and implement e‐Government solutions. Some of them have already implemented and obtained substantial benefits from it; others have just started or planned to employ it. However, most of the developing countries, are facing various challenges in implementing such solutions, for example, the high cost of ICT infrastructure and lack of professionals or trained staff to control and maintain the services offered. The researcher believes that cloud computing might play a vital role in providing solutions for today and in the future.
Two key aspects related to e‐Government is currently perceived; continuous development of ICT infrastructure, and continuous rise of consumers’ skills and knowledge of using computers and the internet( Cellary, and Strykowski, 2009). These two aspects provide opportunity to enhance the provision of e‐services to the public and private sector. Government authorities should take it into consideration for the development and utilising e‐Government solutions. To achieve this aim, the cloud computing should be applied in the public sector. Cloud computing allows to uniformly cover the entire area of e‐Government services, independently of difference of local administrative bodies that may be worse or better organised to offer e‐services. This is particularly the case in the countries where their ICT infrastructure is not developed as in developed countries such as the Kurdistan Region of Iraq( KRI). According to the director of the Erbil( capital of KRI) municipality
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