MUSCAT -- The Information Technology Authority (ITA) recently signed an agreement with the Estonian-based Nortal, an international software development company for the supply, design, delivery, implementation and operation of the G-Cloud for three years. Dr Salim Sultan al Ruzaiqi, CEO of ITA and Peeter Smith, Nortal's Managing Director have signed the agreement on behalf of both parties. 

Intending to serve as a private cloud-shared infrastructure for government entities, the G-Cloud agreement comes to setup a single infrastructure platform to meet the requirements of various services online. The G-Cloud platform features various data resources such as servers, storage and broadband connectivity. Based on ITA's approach towards utilising OpenSource technologies, the cloud solution will be completely open-sourced. The objective for implementing the G-Cloud is to improve ministries' business outcomes by consolidating their IT infrastructure, reducing the IT budget and increasing their agility as well as to provide government ICT services at a reduced cost.