The Office of National Digital Economy and Society Committee (ONDE) is studying ways to determine benchmark rental fees for state organisations to rent cloud services from private cloud providers to facilitate their digital transformation.
A benchmark rate will be set for each category of cloud services for rent from private Thai or foreign cloud operators, as the Government Data Centre and Cloud (GDCC) cannot expand its cloud capability quickly enough to keep pace with high demand from these state units.
According to the ONDE, the benchmark will be a tool for state agencies to decide to rent cloud services outside the GDCC.
Private cloud operators would benefit from the move as it would be easier to propose services to state agencies with a reasonable tariff in line with the benchmark.
The result of the study on the benchmark rate will be submitted to the cabinet for approval.
The GDCC is the central cloud system used by government agencies, ensuring security and serving as a big data facility for state agencies.
Putchapong Nodthaisong, secretary-general of the ONDE, said the GDCC, which is operated by National Telecom, has provided cloud services to 230 state departments and 981 agencies via its current capability of 40,000 virtual machines (VMs) or 7,412 servers.
However, the real demand of all state units nationwide that need to adopt digital transformation is around 800,000 VMs.
Mr Putchapong said the ONDE earlier requested a government budget of 2.2 billion baht per year as part of the plan to expand the GDCC's capability by an additional 25,000 VMs for three years.
However, the ONDE's budget is only 1.1 billion baht per year. The ONDE, through its Digital Fund, will have to spend an additional 700 million baht per year to help the GDCC's service expansion.
The previous government encouraged state units to mainly use the GDCC's cloud services.
The rental fee benchmark development is in line with the Go Cloud First policy of the Digital Economy and Society (DES) Ministry to further develop digital infrastructure through the third phase of the master plan for digital transformation roadmap called Full Digital Transformation between 2023 and 2027.
During his policy announcement to parliament this week, DES Minister Prasert Jantararuangtong said the ministry would focus more on promoting the expansion of the standard public and private cloud infrastructure and will lure more foreign cloud operators to set up cloud data centres in Thailand.
Mr Putchapong said the ONDE cooperates with private service providers to train government personnel who use the GDCC's services to gain technical expertise in cloud management.
It also drives the integration of government data and creates open data for agencies that use the GDCC's services.
He said the ONDE plans to develop seven projects to push digital-related businesses to contribute 30% of GDP by 2027, more than 6 trillion baht, rising from 12% or 2.2 trillion baht in 2022.
The seven projects include one to develop a central public health cloud system or Health Link, so that public health service units can quickly provide services with high data security in accordance with standards.