Cloud computing and public administration: approaches in several European countries

The Digital Agenda for Europe 2020 has more objectives from increasing the participation of its citizens and consumers in the digital society to creating a fully interconnected society. These objectives can be supported through a high degree of digitization achieved at public administration level and an increased performance in delivering public services. Cloud computing is one of the ICT areas with a fast growth in the last years that presents a big promise for achieving the objectives of the Digital Agenda for Europe 2020. This paper aims to present what cloud computing is and how it can help the public administration to increase its performance. From Infrastructure as a Service continuing with Platform as a Service and moving up to Software as a Service each level of cloud computing is presented in here with its strong and weak points and how it is suitable for a given use case in public administration. The challenges and the risks of moving to cloud and the differences between public, private and hybrid cloud are also presented in the paper. The research done by the author is both theoretical and literature review and combines knowledge from different areas. An analysis and examples of cloud computing approach and implementation in several European Union countries are presented in this paper to facilitate the understanding of the subject. Cloud computing can help public administration to decrease costs, standardize services in different locations, integrate public resources and provide a higher transparency in the government act.