Augustin Jianu, Romania’s communication minister, said the government plans to build its own cloud service that would centralize all of the state’s IT infrastructure and applications, Hotnews.ro reports. It would cut the costs associated with the current decentralized IT infrastructure, the minister says.

“The issue at this point with public administration is that salaries (the state is willing to pay - e.n.) in the IT field are low, the people are few, and the IT systems are costly and decentralized. Every institution has its own servers and systems, so the maintenance and operational costs are very high,” Jianu said. “This infrastructure usually overloaded and cannot keep up around 10% of the time while around 90% of the time it is idle and nobody uses it.”

The new government cloud infrastructure would be developed in a public-private partnership. It would gather all the IT systems and servers the government uses to interact with citizens and provide public services. The cost of the project has not been estimated yet, but EU funding would cover parts of it.

“When I am speaking of a government cloud I am thinking of at least two Data Farms, if not more in the future, where all the applications and data bases the government uses to interact with the citizens and provide public services can be centralized. We are speaking of the applications of [the tax authority] ANAF, the National Health Insurance House, the Employment Agency, so all types of public services, including those for issuing electronic IDs or marriage documents,” the minister said.

According to Jianu, a government agency would be tasked to work together with the private sector on this project. The infrastructure would be provided as a SaaS (Software as a Service), and the private side would be in charge with the design, construction, operation and maintenance. “The state will have the ownership, the control and will supervise that security standards and work procedures are met,” he said.

This project would be split in two phases. A short-term phase of 3 to 5 years would cover the evaluation of existing systems, while a  long-term phase of 10 to 15 years would entail the building of the cloud, having all applications delivered as SaaS and evaluated.

The National Informatics Research Institute (ICI) already developed a EUR 17 million cloud platform for public institutions in Romania. The minister says however that that cloud infrastructure is used for research. “The ICI cloud definitely cannot deal with all the current national infrastructure,” Jianu said.

The ICI granted through a bid, at the end of 2014, the contract for the building of a cloud platform for public institutions to a consortium made up of UTI, Ymens Teamnet and CP Consultant Services, with Siveco and Romsys as subcontractors. Ymens Teamnet was part of missing Romanian businessman Sebastian Ghita’s group of companies.

According to Eurostat data, in 2015, only 11% of Romanians were using the internet to interact with the public authorities in the country, and only 5% were using the internet to download official forms from public authorities or send filled forms to public authorities. Less than 10% of firms in Romania use cloud computing, according to a recent World Bank report.

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