Delivering citizen services to all citizens with ease has been a long standing challenge for all governments all around the world. The primary reason being the channels of access for all regions of a country are not equally developed. This lack of development, specially for the rural areas in terms of IT accessibility has been a challenge to implement e-Government solutions.
For example, if you take Sri Lanka as an example, the more populated districts like Colombo, Kandy or Galle has more access to Internet bandwidth, while less populated districts like Polonnaruwa, Mannar or Monaragala has less access to Internet bandwidth. This is mainly because of the fact that the Internet service providers are more focused on more populated areas rather than less populated areas.
However, if the government is considering providing citizen services via e-Government, it is a must that there is opportunity for all citizens all over the country to have some form of access to these e-Government services. Thus one of the key considerations would be to have the ability to deploy the IT assets that are required to power the e-Government solutions with limited Internet bandwidth and sometimes with limited IT resources. Yet all those isolated deployments got to be able to be connected to a central system and run with a unified data model.
For example, the central government would want all the local government entities to deploy and operate a unified set of applications for all citizens across all local government entities. Though it is a unified set of applications, there need to be clear boundaries as each local government operate on its own. The unification comes as a form of regulating standards across all local government entities by the central government. At the same time, each local government entity could have their own custom applications too.
Cloud computing model can offer an easy means of achieving the unified application model across all local government entities with multi-tenancy. The central government can deploy a public cloud, operated by the central government, where each local government (LG) entity can be treated as a tenant. The unified set of applications can be deployed into an app store, where they can be easily deployed across tenants, on other words LG entities. Thus each tenant becomes an e-Local-Government, and the whole setup consist of the overall e-Government solution.
Having one public cloud could be challenging for those rural local government entities with limited Internet access. This is because, for the users, be it the local government employees or the citizens of that local government, to access the e-Government applications, they need proper Internet connectivity. If the connectivity is not readily available, what could be done is to deploy the same applications deployed on the cloud locally and time to time sync those up with the central public cloud. This hybrid cloud deployment is depicted in the following deployment diagram.
The key elements of the cloud computing based e-Government solution deployment are:
- Central operations
- This is a public cloud deployment by the central government
- All local government entities have a tenant each in the cloud, e-LG1 to e-LGn
- e-Government applications run under each tenant for every local government, isolated from other local governments
- e-Local-Governments with good Internet connectivity (for example e-LG(n-1) and e-LGn)
- Access the applications deployed within the e-LG tenant within the central cloud over the Internet
- There are no local deployments
- Application state and data for the e-LG tenant within the central cloud always reflect latest state
- e-Local-Governments with poor or no Internet connectivity (for example e-LG1 and e-LG2)
- Access the applications deployed locally on-premise
- The e-LG tenant applications deployed within the central cloud are synced with the equivalent applications deployed locally on-premise over the Internet time to time
- Application state and data for the e-LG tenant within the central cloud always reflect last synced state
- Application state and data for the e-LG on premise always reflect latest state
Note that, in the deployment diagram, you see WSO2 Stratos being used for the central cloud deployment and WSO2 Carbon used for local setups to deploy the same applications locally. Being able to deploy the same applications both on cloud as well as on premise, with zero code changes, is one of the key value propositions of the WSO2 middleware platform, that is leveraged in this e-Government solution.
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