PAKISTAN CLOUD FIRST POLICY Scope and Adoption PCFP applies to all PSE under the federal government intending to make new ICT investment(s). The PCFP will also serve as useful guidance to regulated sectors and private sector organizations as they continue to undertake digital transformation. PCFP is issued to support the digital transformation of the ICT landscape in Pakistan, improve efficiency, provide quality service delivery, and encourage investments in ICT. Objectives The government of Pakistan aims to achieve the following objectives with this policy: a. b. c. d. e. f. g. h. i. j. k. l. To reduce time to procure and time to launch by maintaining a pre-accredited list of CSP. To reduce the cost of ICT infrastructure by paying only for the services that are utilized. To encourage investment in cloud services by local and International CSP in Pakistan. To facilitate CSP achieve economies of scale. To provide enhanced information security to end-users via cloud offerings. To provide transparency to citizens with digital government solutions. To increase utilization of cloud solutions by transitioning from local hosting to cloud hosting. To foster a digital entrepreneurship ecosystem by providing readily available cloud services. To attain optimization via aggregation of resources. To develop a cloud enabled workforce. To obtain environmental benefits achieved by optimized use of resources. To put forward a synchronized approach to ICT procurement across the governments/provinces. Current State of Cloud Computing in Pakistan 6.1 Current ICT Infrastructure landscape Distributed infrastructure which is available in small clusters is difficult to manage. Estimating and planning for the future expansion in a fragmented infrastructure is a challenging task. There is a dire need to have a consolidated infrastructure for PSE in Pakistan. Currently, the utilization of cloud services in the public sector is low and majority of the data centres cater for the need of a single organization only. Cloud offers better security and optimization of resources, whether in terms of personnel or compute, storage or network utilization, which cannot be achieved in a fragmented ICT infrastructure 6.2 Human Resources With the adoption of cloud solutions, certain data centre roles are replaced with domain skills for process automation, resource optimization, architecture, and cost management. One of the objectives of this policy is the development of a skilled cloud-enabled workforce to foster cloud adoption and implementation throughout Pakistan. PSE will be facilitated to ramp up the skills of their existing IT personnel and transform them into a cloud-enabled workforce. Moreover, with the increased demand for cloud technologies, skills, training and development of relevant quality human resources is critical. Special initiatives for the training and up-skilling of the workforce will be prioritised for accelerated cloud adoption. Page 7 of 21