The Ministry of Health (MOH) launched recently the first phase of Private Claude Computing, which is considered as the first of its kind in the public sector as well as in the health sector in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The Infrastructure as a Service 'IaaS,' will enable the ministry's ICT staff to utilize and expedite infrastructure services to users effectively. Dr. Mohammed Alyemeni, Advisor to the Minister of Health and General Supervisor of ICT pointed out that the first phase will be followed by the Software as a Service 'SaaS,' and the Platform as a Service 'PaaS' in the near future. The MOH is seeking through ICT to implement the National E-Healthcare Project which receives a direct support from the Minister of Health Dr. Abdullah bin Abdul-Aziz Al Rabeeah, he added. There are more than 100 ongoing vital and developmental projects under the umbrella of the National E-Healthcare Project that represent MOH vision in enhancing healthcare in the Kingdom. For its primary goal of Patient care, the Ministry has prepared a five-year plan strategy to make E-health an essential factor in developing and providing services, he said The Ministry will be able to double the number of virtual servers quickly and with high flexibility. This environment will support a large number of operating systems and also the memory and storage capacities, said Dr. Abdullah Al-Wuhaibi, the assistant supervisor General of ICT. "These these services can be monitored through single Pane of Glass that reduces the time required to meet the needs of users from several weeks to hours," he added. "The potential storage capacity of cloud computing is based on virtual storage that allow to current 200 terabyte to infinity," said Eng. Ahmad Al Hudaith, the Assistant manager of ICT projects office. "Among the components of the environment used in Private Cloud Computing are BladeSystem Matrix servers and Next Generation-Cloud Ready 3Par SAN Storage," he pointed out.
