PNG Government Virtual Private Cloud on-boarding Government agencies

 PNG Minister for ICT Timothy Masiu today announced that the Marape Government has endorsed to commence using cloud services through a whole-of-government approach as part of the rollout of cost-effective and efficient computing services.

“I wish to inform our citizens of further progress made with the government’s digital transformation efforts. Since I informed Cabinet of the status of the Government’s IGIS project and the IGIS data centre in March this year, my Ministry and the Department of Information and Communications Technology has taken steps to start moving government agencies to the cloud. The Department of Information and Communications Technology will coordinate whole-of-government approach and will be provisioning a virtual private cloud arrangement for government cloud-based services to all government agencies on a needs-basis. I believe that in doing so, government as a whole can now move away from the legacy problems associated with the on-premise owned and operated infrastructure model such as IGIS.”

Minister Masiu highlighted that government computing costs were an annual headache and the decision to migrate to the cloud was also taken as a cost-saving measure.

“Government employs about 122,000 people and this is equivalent to tens of thousands of personal computers, UPSs, licensed software, servers, and volumes of data and information generated and stored in on-premise computing infrastructure and mounting software license renewal, security and maintenance costs.” 

Mr. Masiu said that the government on average spends at least K160 million yearly on general telecommunications and Internet services with private Internet Service Providers (ISPs), and this annual expenditure comprises K40 million on Internet access; K100 million on telephony services; and K20 million on dedicated Internet connections, data storage and website hosting. 

“Our commitment to our citizens remains, and that is to keep on slashing the government’s K160 million annual bill and funding some of the government’s own ICT goods and services programs from the savings achieved.”

Mr. Masiu reminded all government agencies that the Department of Information and Communication Technology is mandated as the coordinating agency for:

• public sector cloud infrastructure and services specifications and standards, and implementation; and

• shared ICT services to all public bodies

“The National Executive Council has already directed government agencies to coordinate the planning and implementation of all cloud-related services with the Department of Information and Communication Technology, and I would be expecting my Departmental Head and the staff at my department to be kept busy with requests for cloud onboarding and shared services, amongst other things.”

In the meantime, the Ministry has already commenced discussions with PNG DataCo on the strategic usage of its data centres.

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