Seeding The Global Public Sector Cloud: Data Classification, Security Frameworks And International Standards

All of a sudden, everywhere you look, the cloud is the new normal. Top service providers' cloud revenues are doubling year on year at the start of what is predicted to be a sustained period of growth in cloud services.  As IT workloads have migrated to the cloud, the private sector has led the charge.  Governments have been towards the rear, with cloud spend to date generally accounting for less than five percent of a given country's public sector IT budget.  This looks likely to increase quickly as the public sector starts to overcome the blockers to cloud uptake.

The classic NIST definition of the Cloud specifies Software (SaaS), Platform (PaaS) and Infrastructure (IaaS) as the main Cloud services (see figure 1 below), where each is supplied via network access on a self-service, on-demand, one-to-many, scalable and metered basis, from a private (dedicated), community (group), public (multi-tenant) or hybrid (load balancing) Cloud data centre.