Dubai
The Telecommunications Regulatory Authority (TRA) of the UAE is offering public cloud services to government and semi-government entities as part of a marketplace to digitise their services.
Saeed Belhoul, director of government operations department at TRA, told Gulf News that there is no option to offer the service to private sector yet.
The services offered are infrastructure as a service (IaaS), email as a service and voice over internet protocol (VoIP).
IaaS is part of the cloud service whereby the computing infrastructure, storage and databases are managed over the internet as a pay-as-you-go method.
“Our next focus is now on software as a service (SaaS). The key issues for many organisations not moving to the cloud is data sovereignty and security. In order to bridge this gap, TRA will offer flexible choices on a platform within the UAE,” he said.
He said all the service-level agreements (SLAs) are predefined as an official commitment that prevails between a service provider and a client.
The marketplace now has Etisalat and du as service providers and TRA is in talks with other private players to come to the marketplace.
“Government entities have the option to pick and choose services. Already 27 entities are utilising the cloud services,” he said.
