Brian Lenihan Jnr (Dublin West, Fianna Fail)

At the outset, I should point out that a great deal of cultural material is already available on-line and accessible by any person through the Internet. Examples of this include the 1901 and 1911 censuses which have been made available by the National Archives at www.census.nationalarchives.ie; the digitisation of church records which have been made available by the Department of Tourism, Culture and Sport at www.irishgenealogy.ie; a searchable database of approximately 80,000 records of key Irish manuscripts and periodicals made available online at sources.nli.ie by the National Library of Ireland; and a searchable database of artefacts made available by the National Museum at www.museum.ie. There are indeed many more examples from these national cultural institutions and from other institutions that are grant-aided or funded by the Department of Tourism, Culture and Sport.

Cloud computing is a relatively new and developing area of information and communications technology, ICT. It is a model for enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources such as networks, servers, storage, applications, services, and data that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction. However, it is still a relatively immature development in that there are considerable issues to be worked out. Examples of these issues include the security of applications and data, most especially in the context of Government data protection obligations; the performance and reliability of the cloud computing platforms and associated networks; the need to avoid vendor lock-in on proprietary platforms which could make access to information and the cost of the service prohibitive or bad value for money; and the fact that commercial and revenue models for Government's needs have not yet been fully developed by the market.

My Department is satisfied that cloud computing is a key component of the future of ICT in the Irish public service. To that end, officials of my Department are actively researching and trialling cloud computing solutions with all of the major ICT vendors in the market and are discussing the issues I mentioned at the highest levels in those companies. I should point out that the issues I have highlighted are of equal concern to colleagues in other EU member states and in US state governments. However, we believe that over time they will be resolved, and that we will be migrating to cloud computing platforms that are appropriate for the public service on an incremental basis in the coming years, an approach we believe will be common with other Governments.

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