Cloud Based E-Government: Benefits and Challenges

The use of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) has good impact on performance of businesses. Keeping a successful implementation of e-business in mind, governments decided to use ICT in public affairs in order to improve the performance of public sector organizations in the form of providing best possible information and services to citizens, businesses and other governments. With the passage of time computing technologies have made advancement and governments around the world were thinking to make good use of advanced computing technologies in government organizations. Today most of the countries are facing financial crises and as a result they are cutting extra spending and as a result governments are shrinking ICT budget. E-government is a huge project which requires good amount of money from the government. Some of the new inventions in computing technologies made it possible to reduce costs and increase efficiency and flexibility according to the needs of government sectors. One of the new inventions is cloud computing where information and computing services are provided as utilities. The use of cloud based e-government is to help the governments in providing best possible services to the citizens and businesses, and to reduce the costs as in cloud based e-government they will not require to purchase and install the ICT equipments on their own premises. In this paper we analyzed cloud computing and its applications in the context of e-government. Keywords– E-government, ICT, SOA and Cloud Computing