Digital curation of records in the cloud to support e-government services in South Africa

Many scholars lament the poor infrastructure for managing and preserving digital records within the public sector in South Africa to support electronic government (e-government). For example, in South Africa, the national archives’ repository and its subsidiary provincial archives do not have the infrastructure to ingest digital records into archival custody. As a result, digital records are left to the creating agencies to manage and preserve. The problem is compounded by the fact that very few public sector organisations in South Africa have procured systems to manage digital records. Therefore, a question is how digital records are managed and stored in these organisations to support e-government? Do public organisations entrust their records to the cloud as an alternative storage given the fact that both physical and virtual storage are a problem? If they do, how do they ensure accessibility, governance, security and long-term preservation of records in the cloud? Utilising the Digital Curation Centre (DCC) Lifecycle Model as a guiding framework, this qualitative study sought to explore digital curation of records in the cloud to support e-government services in South Africa with the view to proposing a framework that would guide the public sector to migrate records to cloud storage. Semi-structured interviews were employed to collect data from the purposively selected Chief Information Officers in the national government departments that have implemented some of the electronic services, such as the Department of Arts and Culture, Department of Home Affairs, Department of Higher Education and Training and the Department of Basic Education. Furthermore, the National Archives and Records Services of South Africa was also chosen as it is charged with the statutory regulatory role of records management in governmental bodies. So is the State Information Technology Agency (SITA), a public sector ICT company established in 1999 to consolidate and coordinate the state’s information technology resources in order to achieve cost savings through scale, increase delivery capabilities and enhance interoperability. Interview data were augmented through document analysis of legislation and policies pertaining to data storage. Data were analysed thematically and interpreted in accordance with the objectives of the study. The key finding suggests that although public servants informally and unconsciously put some records in the clouds, government departments in South Africa are sceptical to entrust their records to the cloud due to a number of reasons, such as lack of policy and legislative framework, lack of trust to the cloud storage, jurisdiction, legal implications, privacy, ownership and security risks. This study recommends that, given the evolution of technology, the government should regulate cloud storage through policy and legislative promulgation, as well as develop a government-owned cloud managed through SITA in order for all government departments to use it. This study suggests a framework to migrate paper-based records to cloud storage that is controlled by the government