Cloud Computing and its Impact on eGovernance Architecture

eGovernance has made rapid progress in the last decade. Today thousands of eGovernment systems are operational which provide a large variety of G2C, G2B and G2G services. With the rising maturity and complexity, the stakeholders have begun to realise the need for developing interoperable and reusable systems. The interoperability and reusability enables rapid scalability in terms of both functionality and reach. However, this is not possible if the eGovernment systems are designed and developed independently by different government agencies and departments, where the focus is only on achieving the agency / departmental objectives. With this realisation many Governments have adopted the Enterprise Architecture approach. The IEEE standard 1471 defines Enterprise Architecture as "fundamental conception of a system in its environment embodied in its elements, their relationships to each other and to its environment, and the principles guiding its design and evolution", and architecture framework as "set of common practices for architectural description established within a specific domain or stakeholder community". Various Governments and Government agencies have created architecture frameworks for use within their domain. Some examples are European Interoperability Framework (EIF), Federal Enterprise Architecture Framework (FEAF) of USA etc. The Governments around the world are rapidly following these leads and building their own frameworks. The Government of India has constituted expert groups for building an interoperability framework as well as FEAF for eGovernance in India. While these developments are going on, a paradigm shift in the form of cloud computing appears to be taking shape. With the advent of cloud computing, and large scale support it is getting from the technology vendors, it is inevitable that before long, eGovernance architects will have to deal with cloud computing. A lot of literature has been generated with arguments for and against cloud computing. In this paper we first look at cloud computing from the architecture perspective. We have raised the issue of whether cloud should be viewed as just the infrastructure layer of an enterprise architecture ( based on the four layer EA model of TOGAF), or should it be viewed as the environment in which eGovernance systems operate, or both. We have then tried to categorise the issues about cloud computing based on how it is viewed architecturally. Then we look at some of these issues and challenges which will be more relevant to eGovernance architecture. We feel that once an architect has this clarity, he / she will be better equipped to make most optimal architectural decisions for the eGovernance system under construction.