Hong Kong updating Digital 21 Strategy

Review needed to maintain competitiveness.

The Office of the Government Chief Information Officer is also expected to further develop the government’s plans for a private cloud platform. Government CIO Daniel Lai said that in view of technological advancements and industry developments since 2008, it’s time for another major review to maintain Hong Kong’s competitiveness.

“The review will come up with long-term goals and strategies which can sustain and drive Hong Kong’s ICT development and economic growth in the years to come.”

OGCIO will deploy a new, third generation hosting platform for e-government services this year. Lai said the government has already appointed a contractor through an open tender to implement a new hosting infrastructure for supporting Government-to-Business (G2B) and Government-to-Citizen (G2C) applications.

This new platform will be cloud-enabled and will support an e-payment gateway, messaging firewalls and user authentication services to reduce the development time for e-government services. Services such as e-TAX, appointment booking for ID card applications and government notifications and alerts app will be migrated to the new platform.

The infrastructure will be rolled out in mid-2013, and will support up to 100 additional e-government services by 2015.