The Government of Moldova has completed successfully piloting the use of Cloud Computing by ministries and government agencies. Launched on February 2013 with the World Bank support, the private government cloud (MCloud) is now used by 19 government ministries and agencies to deliver eGovernment services to the public. The major MCloud products – IaaS, MPass (government authentication and access control service), MSign (government digital signature service), and MPay (government electronic payment gateway) – are all experiencing rapid take-up, both by the government clients and citizens. Electronic services hosted on the MCloud Platform are in highly demanded and adopted by the public. The e-Government Center/Government CIO in partnerships with sectorial ministries are piloting new services for content management, document management and data exchange, to support governance digital transformation and modernization and improved public service-delivery. Because of its popularity, MCloud Phase I has reached the limits of its capacity in year from the launching. Also, in order to improve its resilience and security, the second, remote data center is required.

Building on this success, we have recently released the bid document for procurement of MCloud Phase II, which will be installed in a remote data center (http://bit.ly/1neZdYN). The extra infrastructure will give at least a threefold increase in the capacity of MCloud Platform, and additional resilience from a second data center and distributed cloud resources. MCloud Phase II will also extend our self-service capabilities, and provide for new backup and archiving services.

The bid document has a broad scope including a freestanding modular data center, virtualization platform, storage and archiving infrastructure and tools, and cloud management software, all to be delivered by a single prime vendor. We have developed the bid document in line with our core principles of technology-neutral specification, transparency and fair competition, and best value for the investment of government funds.

The work we are doing marks another level of innovation in the use of Cloud Computing by governments. We are seeking the widest range of responses from the market so that we can select the best partner to work with us to achieve our vision of governance digital transformation.

By Iurie Turcanu, Government CTO, Deputy-Director, e-Government Center/Government CIO