The State Information Technology Agency (SITA) will launch its government private cloud on 23 November.
Cloud computing is widely acknowledged as key to driving the journey through the fourth industrial revolution, marked by the profund integration of technology into society. SITA’s vision was to establish a government private cloud, defined as “an ecosystem of different clouds”, for exclusive access by government departments; owned by the government and operated and managed by SITA.
To realise this goal, the agency embarked on infrastructure modernisation to re-engineer its digital environment, which included the introduction of cloud capability.
The official launch will be on 23 November 2018.
SITA’s cloud computing programme created a multi-year modernisation roadmap, and gave rise to the government private cloud ecosystem, a connected and orchestrated cloud computing platform. Also known as the cloud foundation infrastructure, it allows the management of cloud resources and workload, irrespective of their location in the ecosystem.
SITA has now implemented the next key phase in the ecosystem, building its biggest cloud infrastructure to date, in partnership with Huawei, IBM and Gijima.
The Department of Higher Education and Training (DHET) was SITA’s first cloud client to accept a proposal for infrastructure as a service, and signed off the completed project on 23 October 2018. The DHET is a 100% cloud customer.
SITA began the building of its government private cloud ecosystem in 2014, and has capacitated in-house cloud sites in KwaZulu-Natal, the Free State, the Western Cape and Gauteng.