Within the next five year, more than 50% of government organizations will rely on this system to store their information within. It will help save their IT budgets and other spending relevant to computer management. Further improvements on the service and its security system will also be conducted to leverage its standard to an international level, said ICT Minister Anudith Nakornthap.

“This year, a lot of new application from public sector are expected to be introduced and within five years, government agencies would execute half of work process through the system,” he added.

The launch of G-Cloud involved the amendment of procurement regulation, ICT related laws,infrastructure improvement, and budgetary adjustment in order to facilitate and encourage public sector to move towards this trend, he revealed.

Nakornthap also said that this system would provide security to confidential information and would save any organizations a large sum of money to be invested in protecting their sensitive information. New applications, he added, will be developed to co-exist with such system to make it easier for users to link their information to the cloud.

“G-Cloud will become an essential IT backbone of the government in the near future,” he said.

Dr Sak Segkhoonthod, president and CEO of the EGA said that the EGA has improved the efficiency of G-Cloud in terms of hardware, software, network and security system after the pilot phase had run since January and proved to be successful.

“We expect to have up to 20 new servers every month which will make up between 80 and 100 new servers by end of the year,” he added.

The G-Cloud service provided by the EGA is free of charge to all agencies as part of the Ministry’s objective to maximise central ICT resources and encourage the use of shared ICT infrastructure.

Next year, the EGA aimed to offer Software as a Service (SaaS) to allow shared applications among different agencies, according to Segkhoonthod.

“We are collaborating with Fiscal Policy Office to encourage the IT budget proposals that go along with the objective of G-Cloud which will help reduce the overlapped investment of the government IT spending and encourage more use of shared services,” he added.

Chanun Puttamilinprateep, advisor at the Bureau of the Budget (BB) said that the BB and the EGA has agreed to support the government agencies to use the EGA’s infrastructure and services in the 2013 fiscal year onward.

“If the government agencies cannot adapt their IT plan to comply with the central facility (G-Cloud), their IT budget proposal might be cut down,” he confirmed.

The BB is one of the 30 agencies who are adopting G-Cloud and will release the budgetary system to network and share budgetary data with other agencies, according to Puttamilinprateep.

Some of thirty government organizations that have adopted G-Cloud consist of the Election Commission of Thailand, the Department of Livestock Development, the Chaipattana Foundation, the Electronic Transactions Development Agency, the Department of Disaster Prevention and Mitigation, the Treasury Department, the Institute for the Promotion of Teaching in Science and Technology, the National Health Security Office and the Department of Community Development.