Migration of government records from on-premises to cloud computing storage in South Africa

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to investigate the public sector's willingness to entrust their records to cloud computing technology with the view to propose potential strategies to encourage cloud migration. This qualitative study, utilised interviews, and document analysis to collect data. The target population consisted of purposively chosen chief information officers and records practitioners from the national government departments in South Africa. A total of ten participants were interviewed and data were analysed thematically. The study made several findings such as that the government was hesitant to subscribe to the privately-owned cloud due to security concerns such as attack of a physical host, bankruptcy, cross-border jurisdiction, sovereignty, access to information, and data loss, as well as the absence of legislation on cloud storage. The study recommends for the enactment of cloud storage legislation and encourage the storage of digital records on a cloud within the borders of South African virtual space.

Colonialism in the new digital health agenda

“…Additionally, many countries in the global south depend on the global north for cloud services. With data centres located in the global north, the influence of big tech has filtered into global south government operations, some of which depend on external digital infrastructures such as cloud storage 46. Cloud computing can be described as ‘a model for enabling convenient, ubiquitous on-demand network access to a shared pool of computing resources.’47 The cloud has revolutionised storage and backup facilities and can be used to enable the sharing and accessibility of health data globally.…”

Evaluation of Data Optimal Storage System in Hybrid Cloud

“…For these users, a private cloud is offered, and it is built in on-premises systems or public clouds by users, therefore users should be managed private cloud by themselves. As a mentioned above, each system has its own characteristics, and one of the popular IT environments is using a mix of on-premises system and public clouds, which is called a hybrid cloud (Weinman, 2016) (Shibambu, 2022). A development and test (dev/test) are one of popular use cases for the hybrid cloud.…”

Factors Affecting Trust in Government's digital services in South Africa

“…Digital services offer government potential tools to drive government operational efficiency and effectiveness which may help build trust between government and citizens (Adendorff & Smuts, 2019). Government, as the biggest economy, is positioned better to set the agenda for innovative solutions to propel the state towards sustainable development (Shibambu, 2022). Over the years South African government has made commendable strides to provide digital services to the citizens.…”

“…Despite the aforementioned successes, multiple factors exist that affect trust in government's digital services in South Africa; data privacy and cyber security being one of the major factors (Terrance, 2023). The data privacy and security concerns are exacerbated by the fact that South African government is at its infancy stages of integrating innovative ICT solutions such as cloud computing to migrate data and applications to the cloud computing storage (Shibambu, 2022). Cloud computing facilitates the centralization of data centers, making information and applications easily accessible anytime and anywhere (Mkhatshwa & Mawela, 2023).…”