UAE’s Telecommunications Regulatory Authority (TRA) has initiated a programme to connect all Federal government related entities and provide seamless connectivity between them using a common infrastructure.

Etisalat and du have been appointed as implementation and operation partners for Federal Government Network (FEDnet) programme, which will provide a common infrastructure creating a convenient and on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources for all Federal government entities.

By promoting communication between various Federal entities across the UAE using a single common and secure infrastructure, the TRA is laying the foundation for subsequent Smart Government initiatives such as ‘mGovernment’ and ‘Big Data’, which will support the transition to the Smart Government Vision.

“The Federal Government Network falls within the communications and information infrastructure. In particular, Smart Government is for the very first time providing capabilities of full connectivity to systems, networks and databases of various federal and local government agencies,” said Nasser Al Ghanim, director general of TRA.

“The TRA seeks through this national project to lay the technical and practical foundations for electronic integration, Single Sign-on and the provision of shared and centralized services, with the most important concept being ‘Cloud solution’,” he added.

Hamad Obaid Al Mansoori, mGovernment director general said: "Smart Government is a concept of integrated multiple-access channels for consumers.  Establishing a federal network is a fundamental milestone in integrating and offering government services.

“FEDnet will deliver and enable a number of services with benefits to the Federal Government.  The FEDnet Cloud Service will empower Entities to subscribe to services and allows them to operate their own Virtual Data Centers (VDC) using the Self Service Orchestration Portal.”

The Cloud solution is specifically designed for virtualization and automation, and enables on-demand provisioning from shared pools of infrastructure across physical and virtual environments in a simpler and more cost-effective approach.

Utilising this approach, the applications will no longer need to map to a physical server and storage device, instead Federal Entities can leverage pools of compute and storage resources to optimize the underlying infrastructure; hence improving ‘speed to market’ in a cost effective manner.

In addition to using Cloud solution to host live applications, government entities can use this pre-existing structure as an experimental or transitional environment, as well as a common location for disaster recovery. This will ensure the optimal use of computing resources, storage and achieving drastic savings in terms of cost.

The infrastructure is scalable to cater for future services. The design allows for new modules of services and networks that can be easily integrated without interrupting the existing setup and services.

The solution allows each entity to order and manage their VDC containers which consist of Compute, Storage, Security and Network resources.

The solution is highly flexible where each entity can size and configure the VDC based on their unique requirements.  The tenant has the flexibility to have single or multiple VDCs. The infrastructure service will be implemented along with FEDnet in February 2015. – TradeArabia News Service