Cloud Computing in Public Administration / Smart PA

Background

This project is planned in order to improve the work of EU public administrations and to support their needs of interoperability, efficiency and flexibility with the main aim to better satisfy EU citizens' exigencies and empower relations with them, exploiting ICTadvantages, in line with Europe Strategy 2020 for the creation of smart cities starting from education, research and innovation.

Cloud computing as a concept is an elastic execution environment that allows network access on request to a shared set of configurable computing resources (e.g. networks, servers, storage devices, applications and services) in the form of services at various levels based on the interoperability.

First, cloud providers, manage the capacity of their infrastructure much more diligently, because an excess of supply can be very expensive respect to the scale of their cloud computing farm.
This efficient management of computational resources enables in general cloud technology to drive the ICT universe to energy efficiency, through a massive use, intelligent and without waste of server infrastructure.

Secondly, and as a result of the first reflection, resources (human and financial) available to the public administration can then be redirected towards the improvement of processes, methods and technological applications instead of dealing with infrastructure aspects.

Finally, the adoption of cloud platforms and services in terms of SaaS (Software as a service), in addition to the aforementioned infrastructure profile, prevents the development of customized and not standardized applications and systems, and therefore it can streamline the service and functionality delivery to the citizens.

In the European context, this type of resource has been taken in consideration from the European E-Government Plan of Action 2011-2015 and from the European Digital Agenda 2010 as the most economical mean to ensure quality to e-government services.

The project proposes, through documents/means/events to develop an approach based upon initially starting the building of a cloud administrations' community. A socially-participated approach which empowers relations between citizens and public administrations will be used.

Concrete objectives and approach

The concrete objectives of the partnership follows the aim to create a tool-kit of documents/means/events in order to develop, open mind and diffuse the cloud using in public administrations activities. They aim to realize: