Singapore focuses ICT spending on cloud applications

Singapore’s government plans to spend more than 30% of its FY2023 ICT budget on cloud applications and plans to drive efforts to move 70% of its systems to the cloud by the end of the year.

According to the Government Technology Agency (GovTech), some SG$3.3 billion ($2.45 billion) has been set aside for overall public sector ICT expenditure, bringing the government’s total investment over the past five years to SG$16 billion ($11.88 billion) .

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An estimated SG$3.8 billion ($2.82 billion) was spent during the last two financial years as the government sought to modernize its backend infrastructure with cloud and total ICT deployment through bulk tenders.

With SG$1 billion ($742.6 million) earmarked for cloud applications this fiscal year, GovTech said it is on track to achieve its goal of moving 70% of its systems to its commercial cloud platform. Currently, 66% of eligible government systems run on this architecture, called Government on Commercial Cloud (GCC), which is part of a five year roadmap To migrate public sector on-premises IT systems to commercial cloud platforms.

Running on Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure, the GCC provides a framework for government agencies to adopt business services provided by cloud vendors.

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The Government of Singapore employs approximately 150,000 professionals across 16 ministries and over 50 statutory boards.

GovTech expects the value of co-developed projects with industry players to climb 45% to SG$1.49 billion ($1.11 billion) of its total ICT spending this fiscal year, up 27% and 20% in 2022 and 2021, respectively Was. In such initiatives, public sector engineers may take on the responsibility of developing one component, while industry players manufacture the other.

This deployment model helps streamline development efforts by leveraging the government’s technology stack and its platform for security compliance and interoperability. Gov Tech said the approach also allows for reuse of tested software components, so applications can be built more efficiently.

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So far, 27 vendors have qualified to co-develop projects with the government using their tech stacks, but the list will be updated with the bulk tender slated for this financial year.

There are three bulk tenders totaling SG$1.85 billion ($1.37 billion) planned for this year, with about 76% or SG$2.5 billion ($1.86 billion) of public sector ICT spending funding projects issued through bulk tenders , which was 27% higher than the previous year. Year. GovTech said that such tenders cut down on the time, cost and effort spent on procurement of ICT services by government agencies, noting that these tenders have been responsible for the rising value of the sector’s procurement since 2018.

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A major bulk tender will go towards enterprise SaaS offerings, where government agencies can access tailored applications on a subscription fee basis. The tender will fund CRM and service management software, among other areas, and low-code development platforms.

According to GovTech, environmental sustainability requirements will also be included in ICT public sector contracts starting next year. Pointing to an upcoming bulk tender for PCs and printers, the government agency said suppliers must meet environmental and energy standards as well as practice packaging and reuse materials. Such criteria will account for 5% of the tender evaluation.

GovTech said it aims to reduce the carbon footprint of its data centers and commercial cloud infrastructure by meeting the country’s BCA-IMDA Green Mark standards and optimizing code reuse for cloud projects this fiscal.

In addition, GovTech will assess the use of containers and microservices for applications to further streamline the development process. These efforts will start in 2024.