Cloud Computing Can Contribute to Uganda’s Development

The use of Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) to improve how goods are produced and services are delivered and consumed is a feature of everyday life in the developed countries. Therefore, if ICT is used appropriately, it has the potential to vastly boost productivity. Cloud computing is being viewed as a potential area by businesses and government agencies in Uganda to improve efficiency and effectiveness of business operations in government and business enterprises. The potential and impact of cloud computing is undoubtedly quantifiable; however, findings and conclusions drawn from surveys, studies and experiences of different companies are inconsistent. This article, therefore seeks to support and encourage the application of shared resources, i.e. cloud computing as an enabler especially in government and SMSEs like agricultural cooperatives to maximize or boost productivity and effectiveness of operations.

Key words: ICT, Cloud Computing, productivity, service delivery

Introduction

Uganda has continued to embrace the use of Information and Communications Technology for development through the formulation of appropriate policies, creation of an enabling environment for private investment in ICT and the provision of infrastructure for ICT growth. Access to internet bandwidth is improving through technologies like 3G, WI Max, Fiber and Satellite and this can be attributed to increase in literacy rates, the increased demand for information services in both the rural and urban centers, the growth and competition in the private sector, the need for effective service delivery by governments and the increased global investment in ICT infrastructural development.

The economic case for the contribution of ICT to economic growth is illustrated in the diagram below. The postulated relationship between access to ICT and economic growth is spelt out through a five-step process starting at the bottom of the pyramid.

Source: Eggleston, K; Jensen, R; and Zeckhauser, R; 2002, ‘Information and communication technologies, markets and economic development’, in G. Kirkman et al. The Global Information Technology Report: Readiness for the Networked World. Oxford University Press, New York, p 71.

The economic justification for providing better access to ICT is that up to-date and reliable information about markets and availability of resources can be more easily disseminated to even hard to reach areas. The recipients of the information are then better able, as both producers and consumers, to participate in effective markets. The immediate consequence should be income gains for participants, and the ability to better spend their incomes. Over the long term, enhanced access to information should enable producers to significantly improve their practices. Such improvement lays the path to economic growth. [5]

Efforts to integrate IT into business with institutions (Public and private) in Uganda are capital intensive. Businesses and government institutions incur high costs to purchase hardware, software, software licenses, and maintain the infrastructure. This therefore increases the cost of doing business which ultimately affects demand and supply [4].

Use of shared resources, for example deployment of cloud computing can provide a cost effective relief and satisfy the need of government and small and medium scale businesses, including Agra-business to boost production and service delivery.

According to Uganda Communications Commission (UCC), internet access in Uganda is approximately 10% of the total population [11] and Uganda’s tele-density is currently approximated at 52% of the total population. Internet access in Africa averages at 7% of the world population as illustrated in the table below. The low access to the internet has therefore impacted on the innovation capacity of businesses, adoption of internet based service delivery by government and ultimately consumption of internet based services. [6]

 

Cloud Computing

Cloud computing is computing, where shared resources, software, and information are provided over a large networked environment like the internet. Cloud computing provides services that are broadly divided into three categories: Infrastructure-as-a-Service such as data centers (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) such as online scanners. [2]

Cloud computing is a technology that uses the internet and central remote servers to allow sharing of resources such as computing power, memory, storage, on-line applications and networking infrastructures. Cloud computing allows consumers and businesses use applications without high capital intensive investment on infrastructure and to access services through the Internet. Global players like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, HP, and IBM have developed private clouds that support their business applications and provide services to many of their clients worldwide. [2]

Developments in Uganda

There has been a number of developments in the ICT sector and particulars in the advancement of the integration of ICT in both government and business. These developments in infrastructural development or availability of markets for internet-based services directly and indirectly provide an opportunity for cloud computing to thrive.

1. Uganda witnessed a large increase in the number of mobile subscribers over the last eight years. In 2013 the number of mobile subscribers reached 14,840,687 operating under 6 network operators. The number of Fixed Internet Service Providers and Mobile Internet Subscribers reached 8 and 3,061,374 respectively. [11]
2. The Government of Uganda (GOU) has realized the contribution of enterprises and established several support institutions to nurture enterprise growth, performance and competitiveness. The GOU is in the process of enacting a Medium and Small Scale Enterprises (MSME) policy to enable them access e-information to enhance their market access, technology transfer and financial management.
3. The GOU is also in the process of establishing the National Backbone Infrastructure (NBI) which is expected to link Uganda’s major cities and thus provide diversified ICT services like internet, VoIP and video conferencing. This is in addition to the potential benefits of Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) platform which is expected to offer telemarketing services, customer support services and other value-added services which are likely to benefit enterprises in the medium term. [10]
4. Following the approval of an e-government policy framework, NITA-U was tasked to work closely with various government agencies to develop a “shared corporate services infrastructure” to map out its architecture for the country’s e-government infrastructure. In June 2011, the Office of the Prime Minister in Uganda also tasked all MDAs to use e-government equipment as provided for in the E-government policy framework. [10]
5. The Virtual University of Uganda (VUU) is the pioneer university in Uganda using cloud-based technology to drive its IT systems. No more need for local servers that are subject to power outages, no need for more extensive support for mail servers, everything is in the cloud and this makes it much more stable. And the best of all is that everything is simple to use. The complex back end work is done by the experts; the front end user is in safe hands.
6. NITA-U and UNBS are government organizations that are spearheading the process of formulation, review and adoption of ICT related standards, for example Hardware / software, applications, processes, project management and technologies within Government for consistence and efficiency. [10]
7. The government of Uganda, through NITA-U is spearheading the process of formulating a multi-sectoral national CERT for emergency and incidence handling of security related incidences. This provides an opportunity therefore for continuity of services. [10]
8. Various private sector initiatives have taken shape in the provision of private premium rated cloud computing services, notably MTN Uganda, Airtel Uganda, Computer Point Uganda among others. Individual organizations purchase cloud services mostly, storage services for backup and recovery.

Business Cases

Business Case 1

In Uganda, agriculture is a key sector for socioeconomic transformation. Agriculture contributes 20% of GDP, accounts for 48% of exports and employs 73% of the population. Although agriculture provides the main source of income for the population, farmers suffer from disadvantages and inefficiencies, due to their higher operating costs, narrow market reach and limited access to agricultural related information. This is the reason why farmers constitute themselves into groups commonly known as cooperatives.

According to the Ministry of Trade, Industry and Cooperatives (MTIC), there are currently over 10,746 registered cooperative societies with a membership of about 4 million. These cooperatives are mainly involved in agriculture marketing and production, savings and credit. They play a major role in financial resource mobilization, agro-processing, marketing of agricultural produce and the provision of other services like transport. A high proportion of these cooperatives are involved in agricultural marketing and produce.

These cooperatives face several challenges, including lack of access to reliable markets that pay competitive prices, weak internal operations and lack of access to modern technology and information. This is partly due to the lack of capacity to engage, use and apply ICTs to facilitate key business processes. There is currently a deliberate strategy to provide continuing member education in skills that should ultimately increase members’ savings, capital accumulation, investment, employment and incomes. The cooperatives, however have not been in a position to provide this training support to their members mainly because of budgetary constraints. Cooperatives in Uganda have almost similar governance structures and internal management processes in design and therefore can easily adopt shared resources and tools like ERPs and web portals for improved and effective operations.

Business Case 2

In a bandwidth capacity survey conducted, by NITA among 101 Ministries, Departments and Agencies (MDAs) of the government of Uganda, 81 MDAs provided responses towards the survey, it was found out that approximately 6.2 billion Uganda shillings per annum is spent on Internet bandwidth, and this is exclusive of maintenance costs, purchase of software and hardware, and licensing among other ICT requirements.

Government ministries, departments and agencies thrive on data and information sharing and therefore require standard data structures. This requires ICT infrastructure to facilitate standardization of applications across government organizations for consistency.

Technology Description

In cloud Computing, business and enterprise applications and infrastructure are hosted centrally in data centers and services are remotely accessed over the internet through mobile phones, computers and any other appropriate ICT gadgets. The cloud may or may not be privately owned but for purposes of ownership and more control, this paper recommends private clouds especially for government applications. The diagram below is a representation of a typical cloud computing architecture.

Cloud computing therefore presents opportunities for users, especially in weak economies like in Uganda to access affordable, high performance infrastructure, more advanced technologies, and incur lesser costs of hardware, software and maintenance. Uganda therefore stands to benefit greatly from this technological advancement.

According to NITA, the Government of Uganda spends approximately 6.2 billion Uganda shillings on internet subscription only per year. This is an expenditure that can be rationalized to provide more impact services through the deployment of cloud computing technologies. Integration of cloud computing into business in Uganda therefore will provide the following opportunities;

1. The costs related to accomplishing institutional functions. As noted in South Africa and China, where cloud computing has been deployed by IBM, Microsoft and other players, cloud computing can lead to cost cuts of up to 30% thus leading to operational efficiency and productivity gains.
2. Most MDAs and organizations in Uganda have weak defense mechanisms due to limited human resource like certified security professionals, but also due to lack of adequate resources to deploy the necessary security infrastructure. With centralized Infrastructure, resources to provide security can be deployed and concentrated on the infrastructure rather than at each MDA. Cloud computing therefore provides a model that works for governments and small and medium scale enterprises.
3.  Cloud computing can support standardization of data structures and platforms for consistency across government organizations. Hosting ERP solutions will provide other applications for MDA’s along with a centralized managed infrastructure facilitates reduced costs on bandwidth expenditure, maintenance and the overall purchase cost of hardware and software. This is a service that can attract markets in Uganda and beyond.
4. Cloud Computing will provide a low cost of access to high performance (high bandwidth, low latency and stable network connection) infrastructure for data center hosting. This provides for professional data handling, data backups and disaster recovery options. Institutions can develop applications delivered to their users over the internet, hence no need to buy servers and upfront licensing, affordability of software licensing being one of Uganda’s biggest challenges.
5. Access/use/interaction with new technologies at no extra cost. Cloud computing will provide Uganda with an opportunity to access multiple open source tools that can be applied to their computing needs, thus reducing the licensing burden on the resource constrained Ugandan users.
6. Improved productivity of businesses through automation of the management information systems and operations, including advertising, marketing and sales
7. Ease of access to both open source and proprietary information in journals and online libraries increased visibility and an improved image of Ugandan states to the rest of the world, thus more opportunities in for investment, tourism, trade, employment and access to international markets.
8. Facilitation of e-governance to improve service delivery, especially in the public sector and ease of information sharing between government institutions and the citizens.
9. Increased access to employment opportunities for the Ugandan unemployed youth and professionals in journalism, broadcasting, money markets and education.
10. Improvement in the education sector through e-learning and online exchanges between different academic institutions, students and tutors.

Conclusion and Recommendations

The demand of integration of IT services into business in Uganda continues to grow and can benefit a lot from cloud computing. Cloud computing won’t solve all of the problems, but will significantly contribute greatly to its social, economic transformation as it is evident in countries like South Uganda, China and India. Government and other small and medium scale enterprises can achieve more, by saving on investment in the ICT infrastructure (hardware, Software, licensing and maintenance) by embracing cloud computing.

However Uganda and its development partners have to enhance sensitization and awareness of the populace about the opportunities cloud computing provides, help make the cost of internet bandwidth affordable and invest more in the development of ICT infrastructure to increase the coverage of the service to wider and more remote areas.

As Cloud computing continues to grow from its infant stage, it must be seen to support economic and institutional realities facing Governments, Small and Medium scale enterprise. The impact will include productivity gain, development of innovative services, and efficient supply chain management, especially for the farmers, implementation of B2B e-commerce and development of a skilled workforce.

Uganda must therefore be ready and start working towards investing in Infrastructure for provision of cloud computing services. As evidenced in China, government support and making cloud computing a national priority will foster its development and growth. In Uganda, therefore, NITA-U needs more government commitment in terms of funding to build clouds to support government applications and businesses.

There is a need to intensify efforts to provide a legal and regulatory framework for confidence building in cloud computing technologies, especially with very pertinent issues like privacy and confidentiality of data/information. Privacy is often a key concern and therefore an obstacle to the adoption of cloud computing services. This will be a key driver for the successful implementation and development of cloud computing especially in Uganda.

References

[1]. PTC’10 Proceedings, cloud computing in developing economies: drivers, effects and policy measures, Nir Kshetri, Professor, Business Administration, University of North Carolina - Greensboro

[2]. G. Lee, D. A. Patterson, A. Rabkin, I. Stoica, and M. Zaharia. Above the clouds: A berkeley view of cloud computing. Technical Report UCB/EECS-2009- 28, EECS Department, University of California, Berkeley, Feb 2009.

[3]. R. Aversa, B. Di Martino, M. Rak, and S. Venticinque. Cloud agency: A mobile agent based cloud system. In CISIS, pp. 132137, 2010.
[4.] Robust Mobile Cloud Services Through Offline Support, Maxwell Omwenga Momanyi, Julianne Suzzanne Sansa-Otim, Agnes F. Namulinda Lumala, African Conference of Software Engineering and Applied Computing, 2012.

[5]. ICT as an Engine for Uganda’s Economic Growth: The Role of and Opportunities for Makerere University, Venansius Baryamureeba,

[6]. [7]. World internet usage and population statistics, http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm , June 30, 2012

[8]. Ugandan government to implement cloud computing, Monday, 06 August 2012 07:10, http://www.communicationsafrica.com/internet/uganda-to-implement-cloud-computing-soon

[8]. TechnologyBanker, Cloud Computing Service for SMEs Launched in Uganda, http://www.technologybanker.com/it-ops/cloud-computing-service-for-smes-launched-in-uganda#.UqmM9idthft

[9]. Cloud computing trends and business opportunities, Compuware, Uniface ©

[10]. National Information and Technology Authority – Uganda (NIAT-U), http://www.nita.go.ug

[11]. Uganda communications Commission (UCC), http://www.ucc.co.ug 

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Human Beings, the Biggest Threat to Information Security

Human beings have evolved from a primitive to a highly sophisticated natural grouping. Humans have attempted and continue to study everything that exists under the sun and the sun as well. This is all in a bid to get more information to better their lives, improve their businesses, gain superiority over everything else, become prosperous and control the Universe. As such, the need for information and information about this information has become increasingly vital as the years go by.

Information, as human beings developed, was transmitted through telling stories, songs, drama and then written text. Today information of all types is stored and transmitted in digital format. The need for this knowledge / Information is not only for business growth, academic prowess, but critical for the survival of the human race and its environment. Information about, among other things, climate change, planets that surround the earth and micro-organisms that cause disease is vital for the survival of humans today and tomorrow.

It is said that the more information one (Individual/Government/ Institution) is in possession of, the more powerful they are in Governance, Trade, Medicine, Manufacturing and, Military among others. A counter argument is that information in the hands of an individual or Government or Institution that does not need it might lead to a catastrophe. Protection and investment in the protection of Information systems therefore is very important. The protection of information systems is to ensure that information transmission systems are not tampered with, that information in storage or transmission is not tampered with, that information in storage and/or transmission is only accessible to authorized individuals that processes involved in the generation of information are not tampered with and are in custody of only authorized people. Information, technology and the processes for the generation, storage and transmission of information are created and controlled by and to the benefit of human beings. Ironically, the compromise of these systems is majorly by and ultimately to the benefit of human beings as well. The human being therefore is at the center of strong or weak security in any environment.

Key Information bleaches of recent times include fraud and theft of money or financial assets from banks and other financial institutions world over. In Uganda, particularly, over 18[1] billion shillings has been lost due to compromise of information systems in 2013 alone, and this is only a figure known to the authorities.  On many occasions, in Uganda, key gov’t information has been leaked. The leaked information is in inform of confidential memos or e-mails and recorded conversations between high profile government officials in key gov’t sanctioned operations. It has been observed in the SIM Card and National ID Registration exercises in Uganda that people, especially in urban centers, provide wrong data (Name, Residence, Date of Birth, Place of birth etc.) to the authorities, and this can only be for the wrong reasons. The damage caused by information security bleaches therefore is of a huge magnitude and extends beyond financial loses to Reputational Damage, Loss of Trade Secrets and Intellectual Property, Loss of Industrial Designs and the worst of them all, Loss of Life. Imagine the effect of a legendary Coca-Cola formula leaking to the press!

On the international scale, Julian Asange started an online NGO- Wikileaks that sells Government secret information to willing buyers, Edward Joseph "Ed" Snowden an American computer professional, a former system administrator for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and a counterintelligence trainer at the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) has been in the news for leaking key classified USA gov’t information to the world. In the recent past, the Republic of China and the USA have been engaged in countless counter accusations of trying to or actually hacking each other’s systems to gain access to key government information. These incidents and more have caused diplomatic uproar and mistrust among the people on how their governments conduct business. Millions of Dollars have inevitably been spent in trying to fight back and recover from any damage these attempted or/and successful leaks have caused. These are just few of the incidents and clearly, all these efforts are initiated by human beings.

Amidst all this, Information security efforts continue to evolve overtime in sophistication and purpose. Information Security can be achieved through a combination of Physical, Logical and administrative techniques to secure information assets. The sophistication of the technologies and processes to secure Information assets allude to the importance of information to the human race and also to the fact that compromise of information assets is on the increase and equally, in a more sophisticated manner.

There is one Key Player that has made the need for information and to protect this information so VITAL, HUMAN BEINGS.

The human beings that might compromise information systems include employees who turn out to be disgruntled, Employees who collude (In an environment where separation of duties is implemented) to beat systems, Manufacturers (Hardware and software) who install malware and back-doors in the products they sell, Governments who want to spy on others for political/diplomatic interests, among others.  Ignorance of information security by Human beings is also a great resource for insecurity.  Social Engineering techniques like Phishing, sharing passwords (voluntarily or writing it on a sticky Note on your desk etc) and giving strangers access to information systems without due process are some of the ways information systems can be compromised. And these techniques are not new they are as old as the Human Race itself and have become handy in the hi-tech era. This means therefore that ultimately, with the Human Beings Involvement in information systems management, with the right tools, resources and time, any system can be compromised.

However, all hope should not be lost, Societies, Companies, Governments and Institutions can achieve an acceptable level of security if human beings are managed better. There is need to invest more in management of Human Resources. Management of Employees, Clients, Competitors, Consumers and Shareholders among others is as vital or even as/more vital as/than installing the most expensive security system for your organisation. A well-managed human resource will more likely manage the technology and other resources better.

“Don't compromise yourself. You're all you've got.”  Says Janis Joplin. Techniques like continuous human resource development programs, continuous screening of the employees (People change according to circumstances and therefore are largely unpredictable), investing in maintaining a stable state of being (Psychological and Social) for employees, and also applying basic principles of information security (Risk Management, Disaster Recovery, Business Continuity, Good Information Security Governance Practices among others) will help a great deal to reduce the exposure to an acceptable level. In summary, there can be enough security but only if there is keen interest in the Human Factor in Information security!

In Uganda, there are a number of companies that can be able to provide advisory/consultancy and technical services to help institutions and the Government nurture an information security culture and help initiate and manage information, information security and information security processes and DERIVE VALUR from the investment in information systems.

The writer is an Information Security Practitioner at iFrontiers (U) Ltd (www.ifrontiers.net).

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[1] Ag. Commissioner Electronic Counter Measure, ‘Current IT fraud Situation Trends and Challenges; Perspectives from the Uganda Police Force’ East African Information Security Conference, Hotel Africana, 20^th -21^st August 2014