Cloud principles

Principle 5: Prepare to share

Statement

Architect services to allow standards-based data and service sharing across government. Share the skills and experience you acquire with other organisations.

Why?

Citizens demand convenient and accessible government services. They expect these services to be simple to use and integrated across government.

Meet this requirement by designing your service to enable the simple sharing of services and data from the beginning.

What does this mean?

• plan for integration and data sharing from the start, by identifying the services and data you need to share with other organisations
• determine the characteristics of the data to ensure your service is compliant and secure. Consider your service's security requirements to protect data and service availability
• take a standards-based API approach to securely exposing your services and data to authorised parties. Avoid customised and rigid integrations at all costs
• use standard protocols, formats and approaches to increase the inter-operability of your service

Digital Scotland Service Standards

Applying this principle helps you to meet the Digital Scotland Service Standards:

2. Solve a whole problem for users: citizens expect government services to be convenient and integrated. By implementing this principle, you are not only extending the functionality of your own service, but opening your organisation’s capabilities and data to allow integration for others. This creates the ecosystem required to enable cross-government integration.