- Electronic contracting
- Innovation
- Electronic notification
- Headquarters and Electronic Board
- Electronic processing
Service cut April 5 – 8: planned actions in relation to the services affected by the calculation of deadlines
Defined by the World Bank as "the closest thing to a digital society", the small Soviet Republic of Estonia is a model country that is leveraged on information and communication technologies, but at the same time is the most dependent on cybersecurity on the planet.
All Estonian public administration is digitized. There are no longer paper records. "In our case, if we lose the digital files we are done as a country. We have no paper records, "said Siim Sikkut, the Estonian government's chief information officer, last Friday. "We have many security systems in place, but things in Estonia, like anywhere, can go wrong," he told a group of European correspondents.
The Baltic state has taken the cybersecurity questions everyone has ever asked. What if someone succeeded in committing a conventional cyberattack or terrorist attack on a data center? What if there was a serious natural disaster or if the Government lost control of its territory due to a coup d'etat or an invasion? The military aggression of neighboring Russia to Ukraine in 2014 made it urgent to update the answers to these questions.
The Government concluded that with the backups inside the country and its more than 30 embassies around the world, it would not be enough to ensure the continuity of the system in the event of a major crisis. In a country where 98% of banking transactions are done digitally and almost all are signed with the electronic DNI, the system must be permanently available with high guarantees of privacy. "In the event of a crisis in Estonia, it is crucial that digital authentication and authorization services continue to operate," says the Government.
"The conclusion was that we need to have one last backup outside our borders," says Sikkut. Placing content in the hands of a private company that specializes in digital cloud services, such as Google or Amazon, was not an option. The country would not have full control over the data. The alternative was to develop their own system together with Microsoft. The project came to fruition last June 20 with the signing of an agreement with the Government of Luxembourg to open in its territory a digital embassy, a reserved high security data center, within the facilities of the Government of Luxembourg, where critical data will be stored for Estonia (census, cadastre, payment system, pension system…). Why Luxembourg? "We chose this country because of infrastructure and because we have very good bilateral relations. I hope that in the future there will be other countries that will open their own data embassies ", says the Prime Minister of Estonia, Jüri Ratas.
The physical location of the servers is secret. As with traditional embassies, the interior of their walls is respected as if it were their own territory, and the host country does not have the right to transfer them, only authorized representatives of the Estonian government can do it. What Estonia is proposing is to apply to the cyber world and data centers the protection that the Vienna Convention provides to traditional embassies.
The project of opening a digital embassy is more than a technological innovation. "The idea is that if anything happens, Estonia can continue to function as a State, even if it does not have the physical facilities here. The government or Parliament could continue to make decisions from anywhere, "says Sikkut, open to considering emergencies as an invasion or a coup. If it had existed in the twentieth century, for the 50 years that the country - founded in 1918 - was dominated by the USSR, he says, "a virtual government could be formed in exile." From a business perspective, Estonia is building virtual space for data embassies in other countries.
(Source: La Vanguardia)