Russia’s national telecom operator Rostelecom has introduced its cloud solution for the creation of multifunctional e-government service centers for Russian citizens, the company announced in a news release last week. The new service was demonstrated as part of the Innoprom innovations-related exhibition held last week in Ekaterinburg.
In March, the Russian government chose Rostelecom to create and serve part of the nation’s e-government service infrastructure under the terms of a public-private partnership.
Multifunctional e-government centers will provide Russian citizens with access to all governmental services available in electronic form, (such as issuing passports and calculing taxes, for example. Rostelecom plans to provide its services to multifuctional centers using a SaaS model to secure seamless interaction between the centers and the local and federal authorities responsible for providing each service.
The cloud model offered by Rostelecom will help the authorities to leverage the roll-out costs of multifunctional e-government centers as well as helping to make further expansion more cost-effective, since all the necessary infrastructure would be served from a single center. In May, Rostelecom announced that it would invest 10 billion rubles,approximately $357 million, in the development of a national cloud computing program through 2015. The company expects the cloud approach would pay off by 2014.
Rostelecom is particularly known for owning and operating a nationwide fiber-optic backbone network, approximately 160,000km in length, which enables it to provide voice, data and IP services to business and residential customers across the entire country as well as to both domestic and international operators.
