The Federal Cabinet is likely to approve Pakistan’s first National Cloud Policy on Tuesday. The policy has been finalized after detailed consultation with international and national stakeholders.
As part of the policy, major tech companies including Amazon and Google will be providing large-scale cloud services to the government of Pakistan. This should help organizations save their data, time, and money.
At the national level, consultation has been done with PTA, SECP, and other institutions as well as the provincial government. According to MoIT, this policy will be applicable to government institutions and ministries, but private organizations are free to choose whether to adopt it or not. It will be obligatory for federal government institutions to join the cloud and cloud offices shall be formed to provide guidance to provincial governments.
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At the federal level, the apex body will be the Cloud Board under which cloud acquisition offices will be formed to guide government institutions on how to buy cloud services and inform them of the requirements. The Cloud Board will convince government institutions and ministries to acquire cloud services to save data, money, and time.
Private organizations will be allowed to provide cloud services to government institutions but for that purpose, they need to be approved by the cloud office. According to this policy, the cloud has been classified into four types including the Government Cloud, Public Cloud, Private Cloud, and Hybrid Cloud.
The data handling mechanism for every cloud will be different. Top secret data will be placed on the Government Cloud only and open data will be placed on the public cloud. Similarly, sensitive data will be placed on the Private Cloud and classified data on the Hybrid Cloud.Advertisement
According to MoIT, this cloud service can only be provided from within the country and no company can provide this service from outside Pakistan. During the consultation process, Google, Amazon, and other major cloud providers were engaged by MoIT, and these companies have agreed to invest in the country.
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