How does cloud computing do government business?

The "China Drug Electronic Supervision Network" running on Alibaba Cloud Computing has officially passed the information security level protection level 3 assessment.

This is the first ministerial-level application system deployed in the cloud in China, and has passed the evaluation of national authoritative institutions. The security of cloud computing data has been proven: government data is slowly migrating to the cloud.

Alibaba has a long history of technical cooperation with the government. When the former Ministry of Railways' 12306 ticketing website was criticized by netizens after its debut, the Ministry of Railways sought solutions from leading companies such as IBM and Alibaba. Other companies backed off due to the difficulty, so Alibaba participated in the transformation and was responsible for the construction of the queuing system.

China's Electronic Drug Supervision Network is the only drug traceability supervision platform in my country. It monitors the entire process of production, circulation, sales and use through an electronic supervision code similar to the drug's "ID card". This website currently covers most high-risk and commonly used drugs such as vaccines and basic drugs, with hundreds of millions of new drug records added every day.

The competent authority of China's electronic drug supervision network is the State Food and Drug Administration. The drug health of the people of the country is no joke. The State Food and Drug Administration has commissioned the Ministry of Public Security's Information Security Level Protection Assessment Center to evaluate the Alibaba Cloud Computing project.

The evaluation conclusion shows that China's electronic drug supervision network basically meets the requirements of the third-level security protection capability; Alibaba Cloud's data security protection measures have passed the actual inspection of the evaluation experts. Alibaba Cloud can achieve high concurrency and low latency while providing a single table storage capacity of hundreds of TB, and can support real-time business query capabilities; multiple data copies and remote disaster recovery (a total of 6 copies of data in two locations) ensure high data reliability.

As of June 2014, more than 80 billion pieces of drug production and circulation data on China's drug electronic supervision network were stored on the Alibaba Cloud computing platform and can be retrieved and queried in real time. With such massive, real-time data, remote data disaster recovery is a major step forward for government agencies in using cloud computing.

With the advent of the information tide, the government's own office and public services are increasingly dependent on IT systems and networks. At present, almost all governments above the county level have opened official websites, and many government functional agencies and service agencies have put their business on the website. E-government has become a real reality. We can see how many services such as driver's licenses and passports are completed on the Internet. The electronicization of government affairs saves a lot of social costs and saves taxpayers' time and energy, but the annual national budget invested in e-government is a considerable expenditure.

The Ministry of Finance released the fiscal revenue and expenditure data for 2013, showing that from January to December, the national public fiscal expenditure totaled 13974.4 billion yuan, an increase of 1379.1 billion yuan or 10.9% over 2012. Fiscal expenditure statistics are calculated by industry, and we do not know the specific amount of IT and network service expenditure of the national public sector, but if the sum of each level of government is added up, it must be an astronomical figure.

Many levels of government and public service departments have their own IT service departments and maintain their own servers. The government IT application environment generally has problems such as low e-government resource utilization, fragmented resource demand, duplicate information system construction, difficult system environment management, difficult engineering construction management, and long construction period.

If government agencies can widely adopt cloud computing, it will greatly reduce government budgets and save taxpayers money.

This is not a pipe dream. First, cloud computing technology has become more mature, its security is guaranteed, and it is widely understood and accepted by government workers and the public. Second, the current government is vigorously promoting government agency reform, streamlining government agencies, and reducing government spending. Cloud computing can greatly reduce government spending on IT.

We can learn from others' experience. In January 2009, the U.S. Office of Management and Budget (OMB) began to pay attention to cloud computing and virtualization. The U.S. Federal Government CIO Committee conducted research and planning on cloud computing models and issued the Federal Government Cloud Strategy on February 8, 2011. The strategy aims to assist the U.S. federal government in optimizing the way government services are provided, improving resource utilization, reducing IT costs, and improving the government's credibility.

According to the U.S. federal cloud computing development plan, the U.S. federal government's huge annual IT procurement budget will clearly be tilted towards purchasing cloud computing services (service products) in the future, rather than large-scale purchases of operating systems and office suites (software products).

For example, the US government's USA.gov website redesign would take six months and $2.5 million a year to complete using traditional methods; however, using cloud computing, the upgrade would only take one day and cost only $800,000 a year. At the same time, it can help the US government solve three key problems: security, performance, and cost.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture's "Cloud Email" project and the Department of Defense's Army Experience Center project used cloud computing to replace the original IT service systems. In addition to solving the original technical barriers and improving work efficiency, the former saved $27 million and the latter reduced costs to one-tenth of the original.

Who are the beneficiaries?

If the Chinese government starts purchasing cloud computing services on a large scale, which cloud computing giants will benefit the most?

Alibaba is very likely to get the first pot of gold. In terms of the commercialization of cloud services and the number of users, Amazon's AWS, Microsoft's Azure, Alibaba's Aliyun and Google's cloud computing have the best chances, but in terms of national security and government trust, Alibaba Cloud is the only choice.

Quietly, Alibaba Cloud has reached cooperation with government departments of seven provincial-level administrative units, including Zhejiang, Guizhou, and Hainan.

The World Internet Conference has just ended, and Jack Ma has already started his journey westward. The People's Government of Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region and Alibaba Group signed a strategic cooperation framework agreement to jointly build a "Digital Internet Xinjiang", focusing on four major sectors: e-commerce, logistics, cloud computing and Internet finance. Alibaba Cloud has won another victory.

Jack Ma then entered Gansu, and Alibaba Group signed a strategic cooperation agreement with the Gansu Provincial Government to carry out a series of cooperation in e-commerce, e-government, cloud computing, big data, O2O and other fields.

Alibaba Cloud has already cooperated with government departments of nine provincial-level administrative units, and it is predictable that Jack Ma will not stop visiting.

Since its establishment, Alibaba Cloud has been questioned by Alibaba internally. Although it has gradually shown its power in the past two years, its revenue is still a fraction of Alibaba Group. Once the government upgrades its IT system on a large scale, Alibaba's early move will show its value.

As a winner of Toutiao's Qingyun Plan and Baijiahao's Bai+ Plan, the 2019 Baidu Digital Author of the Year, the Baijiahao's Most Popular Author in the Technology Field, the 2019 Sogou Technology and Culture Author, and the 2021 Baijiahao Quarterly Influential Creator, he has won many awards, including the 2013 Sohu Best Industry Media Person, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Beijing Third Place, the 2015 Guangmang Experience Award, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Finals Third Place, and the 2018 Baidu Dynamic Annual Powerful Celebrity.