Singapore's government hosting cost goes down by 50% after migrating to the cloud

Singapore has moved a huge chunk of its systems to the cloud and according to a recent cost-benefit study, the move is saving the country 50% in hosting costs. According to Janil Puthucheary who is the senior minister of state at the ministry of communications and information and also the minister-in-charge of the nation’s digital transformation agency, GovTech, about 60% of the government’s eligible infrastructure has already been moved to the government commercial cloud (GCC).

Consequently, all new systems are now being developed directly on GCC which has helped government Engineers and partners become more familiar with cloud development and deployment and also significantly reduced lead times.

The minister also noted that Engineers are now able to develop more efficient systems since they are not worried about ensuring compliance.

“Moving software development onto the cloud also allows developers to focus less on infrastructure and compliance, and more on developing application logic. This saves countless hours and reduces human errors,” said Puthucheary.

However, the minister was also quick to point out that this would not have been possible without strategic partnerships. One such partnership he mentioned was with the Singapore Financial Data Exchange (SGFinDex) a platform that is linked with seven major banks and gives individuals a comprehensive view of their financial information held across various government agencies and participating financial institutions.

Over time SGFinDEX has expanded to also include insurance companies and also comes with tools to help users with financial planning.

Migration to the cloud has been on the government’s top agendas ever since they entered into an agreement with Microsoft in February this year for the development of a sovereign cloud.