The global financial events are driving a need for continued budgetary constraints. As a result, Government of Bahrain transformed the way in which it acquires, operates, and manages its IT in order to realize increased efficiency, effectiveness, and security. The Cloud initiative has become more profuse and mature, making cloud technology an increasingly important platform for innovation on government services and cost optimization. The Government realized that Increased effectiveness and operational efficiencies are key benefits that can be achieved with cloud computing. Cloud computing will enable the Government to consolidate and share IT assets, services and functions resulting in a more efficient use of resources and control budget spending without slowing innovations down. The dynamic natures of some government services require a high cost on sustaining services level, yet Cloud is an adaptable, autoscaling platform that enable scalability of services as demanded without the need to reserve the resources for the entire year. This increase the utilization of the resources and indirectly control power consumption of infrastructure operations. Moreover, Cloud Computing provides increased opportunity for rapid application development and focusing on core business improvements rather than support and infrastructure tasks. The on-demand nature of cloud allow new innovative ideas to start fast and fail fast without incurring a high cost on investment. This has positive impact on accelerating the growth of Bahrain SMEs. the number of migrated entities reached 72 government and semi-government entity

http://nea.gov.bh/Cloud-First-Policy

• Bahrain

• Youth

Government of Bahrain has signed a MoUs with Kuwait Government in order to support Kuwaiti government’s migration to cloud. Bahrain has agreed to prepare an implementation plan based on the lesson learned and best practices to support Kuwait movement to Cloud. (https://www.bna.bh/en/BahrainKuwaitsignMoUoncloudcomputing.aspx?cms=q8FmFJgiscL2fwIzON1%2BDvzbSmItk5SwVZEnszut%2FxY%3D

According to the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), data centers are among the largest users of energy in the country, accounting for about 2 percent of total energy use. However, the Digital Transformation agenda demanded more investments on infrastructure and data centers in order to prepare the foundation for introducing more e-services and applications that can serve people better. Cloud Platforms are implemented based on the idea of shared resources that reduce the need to implement data center for each agency. Moreover, the nature of the Cloud platforms supports the agency on consuming only the needed power avoiding the old habits of keeping machine running ideal. As more of the IT workload shifts to the cloud, the overall environmental impact is substantially reduced. That is because major cloud providers, such as Amazon and Microsoft, are committed to being 100 percent “green” in their own data centers, which makes a definite contribution to the environmental health of the planet. (http://www.mumtalakat.bh/press_release/mumtalakat-migrates-infrastructure-amazon-web-services-cloud/ )

that most government entities own their data centers and run their operations independently with only some applications are running on centralized location. This resulted on lower visibility on government ICT expenditure and increase the security threats on some uncontrolled data centers. Moreover, development of applications are slow and require a long time to setup infrastructure and connectivity across agencies. Security audit were executed on all agencies between 2015-2016 and revealed many gaps and non-compliance. some specific indicators could be: • Optimum utilization of infrastructure • Rapid development and reusability • Manageability and maintainability • Scalability of resources as demanded • Security and less vulnerability • Cost reduction of ICT Operation • Standardization and Compliance