​What is the news about the government cloud, the biggest project to digitize public services, which will receive more than €560 million in funding from the PNRR? The Ministry of Digital Technologies, led by Sebastien Bourduilla, says that the legal framework is currently in place, and the DPS, the Research Institute and the ADR are working on technical documentation for the public procurement procedures that will be launched.

What is the state of government cloud adoption?

The Government Cloud, an IT platform that will host the IT systems of central government agencies, is the largest digitization investment in the PNRR, so HotNews.ro asked the Ministry of Digital Technologies to explain the status of this project.

• “Government cloud investments include 2 major components. First, it is the hard infrastructure – the data centers – and this is the component managed mainly by STS, and subsequently the migration of all these systems to the government cloud, an investment managed at the level of the Romanian Digitization Authority.
• We have now completed the options analysis report: what do we need, why do we need this cloud, as a preliminary feasibility study, which we also discussed with experts from the European Commission and the World Bank.
• We have also created a legislative framework through the Emergency Ordinance, and we are now in the process of defining the Government Regulation on the rules for the application of the provisions of the Ordinance.
• Currently, procurement procedures for the government cloud project have not been initiated. Currently, the project partners are working on the technical documentation: ADR, STS and CyberInt (N/A SRI).
• After the completion of the technical documentation, public procurement procedures will be initiated in a public and transparent manner.” officials of the Ministry of Digital said.

Government cloud: what does the government promise and when should it start?

The Ministry of Digitization says that the goal of the government block, the largest digitization project in terms of number and coverage through the PNRR, is, on the one hand, to protect the data of Romanians so that they no longer remain in fragmented systems because each individual institution, on unprotected systems, is vulnerable , but in a centralized, well-protected location.

• “On the other hand, let’s be more efficient in spending public funds. It is one thing to transfer institutions of the central level (but even of the local level, because we left them such an opportunity in the text of the order) to the state cloud, another thing is to allow each institution to conduct its own procurement procedures. It is much smarter for the state – and we are not the first to think of this – to manage data in a centralized, secure and generally much cheaper system.
• And last but not least: the cloud has its maximum potential when there is a platform of interaction, that is, a connection between the databases of each individual institution.
• Since the end of the previous parliamentary session, we have had a law on interaction, and for the first time this paradigm shift was implemented in Romania. The data does not belong to the ministry, agency, or civil servant, it belongs to the citizens. And the state does not have the right to ask a citizen for information if he already has this information from a previous interaction – this is what is called the one-time principle.” they say in the Ministry.

The cloud should be completed by the end of 2026: the full list of public services is still unknown

Answering the question of what state services this IT system will provide to the population, the ministry gave examples, noting that the list is incomplete.

• “Thus, in the time schedule provided by the PNRR, namely by the end of 2026, we will have at least 30 services from 30 institutions transferred to the cloud. This means that the relevant data will be stored in a safe place, the databases will communicate with each other, and therefore every Romanian will make fewer trips between government institutions.
• The full list of services that will be provided by the government cloud is under development. Already at the order level, we have provided services for storage, logging, auditing and access notifications, data protection, and a marketplace (accessible application store),” the Ministry of Digitization notes.

Regarding the money needed for the commissioning of this IT project, the Ministry indicated the amounts allocated in the PNRR: “EUR 374.73 million to deploy government cloud infrastructure and 187.05 million euros for cloud migration investments. Funding is carried out from PNRR, and process management is carried out at the MIPE level.”

Burduzh, about the government cloud: Citizens will be notified about who, when and for what reason gained access to their personal data

We will remind you that in June 2022, the Government adopted an Emergency Ordinance on authorities that will manage the government cloud, an IT platform that will house the IT systems of central government institutions. At the time, Digitalization Minister Sebastián Burduja said the platform would have a logging and auditing component that would let citizens know who accessed their data.

According to the government announcement, the regulation regulates the general legal regime for the creation, administration and development at the national level of a hybrid cloud infrastructure – the Government Cloud Platform. This is aimed at the use of cloud services by central and local authorities and institutions.

The platform will consist of a private cloud component called “Government Private Cloud” and certified public resources and services from other types of public or private clouds.

The way to use the Platform and the way to achieve the service-level relationship between its components will be established in the Platform Management Guide, which will provide standards, rules, guidelines or characteristics for activities or their results aimed at achieving an optimal degree of quality, as well as rules and obligations in the relationship between the provider and the user of cloud services.

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