The County Government of Uasin Gishu is looking to onboard core systems to the cloud in a move that will bolster efficiency and reliability of its services.

The Department of Information Communication Technology and Innovation, is facilitating the adoption of cloud storage. This plan is in line with digital transformation as outlined in Governor Jonathan Bii’s Nguzo number 3.

“The Governor is very much passionate about harnessing ICT to improve on service delivery and as a department, we are delighted that the Nguzo of digital transformation is a reality,” said County Executive for ICT and Innovation, Eng Lucy Ng’endo, during an ICT staff training on cloud storage and hosting.

The move will see the county cut on expenses as subscriptions for security features as firewalls, operational maintenance of servers, staff manning server rooms and others. The technicality of it is movement from capex to opex.

“There have been costs in maintaining phyisical servers hosting the systems and the department had to think about plans to cut the costs, create more efficiency and improve our services in the process,” said Chief Officer for ICT and Innovation, Felix Kimaru.

“We seek to achieve reliability through more advanced security features in the cloud, so basically it is the best move as we work to offer support in improving government operations and services,” added Mr Kimaru.

According to Director of ICT Mr Titus Kimaiyo, the county will get unlimited space in terms of systems hosting.

“The physical servers had limitations of space in hosting servers, the cloud model is scalable and allows us to host as many systems as possible,” said Kimaiyo, adding: “The migration to cloud will address common issues as power blackouts, intermittent bandwidths and services can be accessed from anywhere anytime.”

The migration to the cloud services has been made possible through a partnership between the County Government and the Konza Technopolis Development Authority.

The training seeks to equip key county staff on access and deployment of the Uasin Gishu core systems and services to the Cloud .