The NLB Cloud Service Implementations - Balancing Security, Agility and Efficiency

The NLB Cloud Service Implementations - Balancing Security, Agility and Efficiency

The National Library Board (NLB) of Singapore is an ardent user of infocomm technologies (IT). It leverages on established technologies to deliver innovative services to its patrons. A robust, agile and cost-effective IT infrastructure provides a strong foundation needed to enable the highly reliable and available 24x7 services library users are accustomed to, and get to expect from NLB. Cloud computing is a critical part of the NLB IT infrastructure. To meet the tight security requirements required as a government agency, NLB invested significantly in the setting up of a private cloud. It is an early adopter of virtualisation, and achieved significant cost-savings and at the same time speed up the provisioning of new servers. Within the safety and confines of the private cloud, NLB was able to explore and implement innovative initiatives such as unified communications for staff and patrons, a comprehensive service enablement architecture used by many NLB services (e.g., Singapore Memory Portal, Infopedia and Archives Online). An analytics-as-a-service platform for text analytics to associate related digital resources has been implemented. NLB’s implementation of cloud computing services goes beyond the private cloud. The public cloud is used for the crawling and indexing needs of the Web Archives Singapore project. A hybrid approach is used for the handling of enquiries across NLB via all channels. A software-as-a-service on the public cloud is used to handle the non-sensitive data and workflow and tracking of the enquiries, while the sensitive data are kept in the NLB private cloud.