The road to cloud: How Singapore government achieved its ambitious goals

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In 2018, the Singapore government set itself an ambitious goal: to move 70 per cent of eligible, less sensitive systems to the commercial cloud by 2023.

The goal was set due to the cloud’s benefits: scalability, resiliency, access to cloud-native services, including AI, and better cost-effectiveness.

By 2024, the government had exceeded this goal, with over 80 per cent of eligible systems migrated to the Government on Commercial Cloud (GCC), GovTech Singapore’s Chief Technology Officer, Chang Sau Sheong, shared at the GovTech Singapore’s STACK Developer Conference 2024.

The government also introduced GCC+ in July 2023, which caters to the higher security requirements of sensitive systems. This created a pathway for agencies to migrate confidential systems to the cloud and access some of the benefits of the commercial cloud.

Singapore’s success is in stark contrast to the global landscape. According to the United Nations E-Government Survey 2024, only 44 per cent of countries have legislation in place for cloud adoption within government.

To understand more about how Singapore achieved its cloud goals, GovInsider speaks to GovTech’s Director (Solution Architect Office), Sakthivel Thangavel.

Setting a high bar

“When delegates come from other countries, they used to ask how Singapore could achieve this. I would say it’s both policy push as well as agency willingness,” says Sakthivel.

He highlights the key role played by Singapore’s cloud-first policy rolled out in 2018, which required agencies to migrate 70 per cent of cloud-eligible systems to the GCC.

In those years, agencies were unfamiliar with the cloud and overall cloud competency was low. To manage this, GovTech set up a central cloud adoption team to build central competencies and work closely with agencies to build their skills.

The central team’s toughest challenge was migrating its first batch of 100 systems, which were reaching their natural end. This trial-by-fire gave the central team much needed experience, which would be crucial in the five-year journey that lay ahead of them.

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Supporting agency progress

“That set the pace for 2020 onwards. We had a very systematic, gradual pace of migration planned out over the next three to four years.

“By 2023, we had a very constant tracking of how the agencies were progressing, in terms of how systems were getting migrated, how competencies were being built, and how we could help them,” Sakthivel said.

During this period, GovTech conducted regular clinics with agency teams to solve agency-specific problems, providing advice and hands-on support.

“In the third or fourth year, we could see the level of need for central handholding was reduced significantly,” he says.

Through these clinics, the team published a central cloud adoption playbook documenting the experiences of various agencies and introduced courses to build up the competencies of agency teams.

In 2022, GovTech introduced GCC 2.0, a redesign of GCC which sought to speed up onboarding for agencies and ease the procurement of cloud-native services.

The redesign was informed by the experiences gathered through the first phase of cloud migration.

Rehost, replatform, or redevelop?

The migration path for each agency was left to their own discretion, explains Sakthivel.

Some chose to “lift-and-shift”, or rehost their existing systems directly onto the cloud; some to redevelop their systems entirely; and others chose to purchase a software-as-a-service (SaaS) alternative.

“Applications shifted via lift-and-shift may not be fully using the cloud-native environment, but even with this migration, the cost-savings are quite significant,” he explains.

Agencies may lack the skillsets to redevelop services in a cloud-native way, with modern practices such as DevOps and Infrastructure-as-Code, he notes.

In this scenario, they could choose to replatform services and only modernise certain components, such as database as a service, he explains. Complete re-development may also be costly, so agencies may wait until systems reach their natural end-of-life.

Every three years, agencies are required to assess if their systems continue to serve business needs sufficiently and if they remain technically up-to-par.

“This will help to decide which systems are becoming less ideal and legacy.”

If redevelopment is necessary, GovTech works with agencies to transform their system in a way that accounts for how the world and Singapore’s policy environment have evolved. 

To prevent disruption to critical systems, the redevelopment process is done incrementally, he shares.

The legacy conundrum

Every agency has been allowed 30 per cent leeway to account for unique challenges – but why stay on legacy?

For one, larger systems could be too challenging to migrate.

“The bigger it is, the more difficult it is to migrate,” Sakthivel says. Bigger systems could take up to a year to migrate without disruptions, he explains.

For mission-critical systems, agencies may find it more stable to stick to the status quo. However, in the longer-term, such systems may run into challenges, such as when integrating with modern systems, he says.

This is why part of the central team’s work has been to raise awareness of these future concerns, though agencies were generally quite supportive of the cloud-first drive.

Agencies that chose to stick with legacy systems could continue to run modern applications, such as AI or GenAI tools, with short-term integrations. These integrations allow agencies to reap the benefits of new technologies immediately and expose officers to emerging ways of working, he shares.

When the legacy systems run their course, these applications could be included in the redesigned platform, he says.

Off-prem as much as possible

Looking ahead, Sakthivel shares: “We do believe, more and more, there’ll be no more on-premises. Everything as much as possible will migrate to either GCC or GCC+ over the period of the next five years.”

However, while GovTech does aim to reduce the government’s on-premises footprint “as much as possible,” he does note that highly sensitive and confidential systems may remain on-premises.

He expects that modernisation will continue at a faster pace for non-confidential systems for now, as the benefits of doing so are more apparent for agencies.

As of 2024, GovTech has set a broader goal of pursuing greater modernisation, with more emphasis on cloud-native development, according to remarks made at the STACK Developer Conference 2024.