• Public Cloud: General public is offered and is allowed to use the Public Cloud infrastructure. Business organizations, government organizations, or some combination of both of them are allowed to use or share this type of deployment model. The public cloud has potentially large computing as well as storage resources, which can be accessed over the public internet. Examples include Google App Engine, Microsoft Windows Azure, IBM Smart Cloud, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), etc.
• Private Cloud: The private cloud services or the infrastructure are provisioned for exclusive use by a single organization. This type of cloud deployment model is managed, owned, and operated by the concerned private organization and may exist on or off premises. Examples of private clouds include Eucalyptus, Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (UEC), Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), Virtual Machine (VM) ware Cloud Infrastructure Suite, and Microsoft Einstein Conversations Insights (ECI) data centers.
• Community Cloud: Community Cloud infrastructure is provisioned for exclusive use by a specific community of consumers from organizations that have shared concerns, for example, mission, security requirements, policy, and compliance considerations. It may be owned, managed, and operated by one or more of the organizations in the community, a third party, or some combination of them, and it may exist on or off premises. Examples of community clouds include Google Apps for Government and Microsoft Government Community Cloud (Attaran & Woods, 2018; Dwivedi et al., 2019).
• Hybrid Cloud: The cloud infrastructure is a composition of two or more distinct cloud infrastructures (private, community, or public) that remain unique entities but are bound together by standardized or proprietary technology that enables data and application portability. Examples of hybrid clouds include Windows Azure (capable of hybrid clouds) and Virtual Machine (VM)ware vCloud.

The only way to provide efficient, transparent, and responsive government services to end users is via e- Governance. Almost all the applications of the government can be automated and reformed as applications that can be consumed over the internet, and higher productivity can be achieved. This can be made more productive as well as secure by adopting the cloud computing model for e-Governance applications. Applications such as income taxes, administration, pension services, logistics, road transportation services, insurance, banking, etc. are utilized as an e-Governance applications (Al-Rashedi, 2014). The three basic elements that comprise e-Governance are government, citizens, and investors. Increasing the number of applications for the government enhances the productivity of the government.

4.1 Types of e-Governance

Figure 3 shows the four different types of e-Governance models that exist as follows (Al-Rashedi, 2014; Belwal & Sharma, 2017).

Figure 3. e-Governance Types

• Government to Government (G2G): The Government to Government (G2G) model involves the interaction, coordination, and collaboration of various government organizations. The organizations involved shared the same infrastructure, database, and other resources in order to fulfill the requirements. This also provides a smooth connection between global and domestic governments. This includes policy formation, administration services, etc.
• Government-to-Business (G2B): The interaction between business firms and the government is primarily addressed by the government-to-business e-Governance model. The B2B model allows access to critical information required to conduct business. All the business sectors require guidance from the government, such as the enforcement of new business laws and regulations, tenders for new government projects, submission of business deeds, new taxation policies, etc., for producing more productive businesses, which is only possible with the Government-to-Business (G2B) model.
• Government-to-Employee (G2E): The primar y objective of the Government-to-Employee (G2E) model is to unite the employees with the government. Services such as reviewing salary records, income tax, holiday counting, applying for a pension, applying for leave, etc. are offered to the employees through this model.
• Government-to-Citizen (G2C): Government-to- Citizen (G2C) includes the services offered by the government for the citizens of the country that can be availed by the citizens from anywhere and at any time. Information such as land records, birth certificates, payment of house tax, and enrollment for the voter card are provisioned by the Government-to- Citizen (G2C) model.

Three service models supported by the cloud computing paradigm play an important role in the contribution to e- Governance (Tomson, 2016).

• Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS): IaaS is responsible for provisioning the storage, networks, processing, and other fundamental computing resources to the end users. e-Governance applications demand 24x7 infrastructure availability in order to minimize and reduce service lag or delay, and thus they require unlimited utilization of the processing unit, bandwidth, and storage, which is only possible with the integration of the application with the IaaS model of cloud technology.
• Platform as a Service (PaaS): Cloud technology provides the support of various development platforms and frameworks for the development of required applications without the overhead of purchasing the licensed software versions or the frameworks. e-Governance application developers can just focus on the requirements of the application development by pooling the PaaS cloud resources (Belwal & Sharma, 2017; Tomson, 2016).
• Software as a Service (SaaS): The SaaS cloud model allows end users to consume the cloud-deployed application as a resource over the internet. Some of the SaaS-based e-Governance applications are e- Aadhar, e-FIR (First Information Report), e-Court, House Tax Payment System, Municipal Tax System, e- Compliant register portal, etc. (Tomson, 2016).

• Disaster Recovery: e-Governance with cloud computing eliminates the destruction of computing resources caused by the occurrence of natural disasters such as earthquakes, floods, etc.
• Auditing and Logging: Provision for auditing and logging are highly and periodically required in government-based applications, which can be applied in a secure as well as transparent way via the integration of cloud technology with the application.
• Data Scaling: The ability to scale with the increase in data is only possible with cloud technology. As the data is increasing exponentially the storage, as well as the processing of such volumetric data, is achieved by cloud technology.
• Enhanced Performance: The demands of the applications can be met by the resource pooling ability of cloud computing, such as vertical or horizontal scaling in cases of higher demand, so as to improve the overall performance.
• Green Technology: e-Governance with the cloud reduces the biohazards caused by electronic waste, air conditioners, and paper losses.
• New Technology Migration: The migration towards the new framework or technology is only possible with e-Governance in the cloud and without much overhead or application downtime.

This computing model has several features which increase its dependency to an incomparable degree, such as resource pooling, pay-per-use (economic), scalability, rapid elasticity, security, and availability. This model allows big or small organizations to get started with the work and to focus primarily on the business modules without worrying about the underlying infrastructure setup costs, i.e., the cost of powerful servers, expensive network devices, etc. The government must realize this importance and promote the continued development of e-Governance applications that can interconnect the government and its citizens by providing uninterrupted cloud-based services.