The government's project to provide cloud-based services to government offices is being handled in an inefficient way that will lower its security and raise costs, said Yanai Milstein, VP of software at Aman.
Milstein heads global data management company Informatica's Israel operations.
Nimbus Cloud Me is the name of the government's cloud computing services project which aims to provide these services to government bodies. It is a joint project by the Accountant General's office, the country's digital administration, cyber directorate and additional government bodies.
Cost-cutting
The project has five main parts: supplying cloud service to the government, setting government policy on working with the cloud and founding a Cloud Center of Excellence, providing consulting and mentorship for use of cloud services, economic overview and optimizing services, and providing third-party services.
The project has already seen some success and managed to bring the infrastructure of major companies such as Google and Oracle to Israel, said Milstein.
While every government office is moving its data centers to the cloud, and this process is making progress, there is no unification of this data, which raises costs for the government and lowers security and service quality, said Milstien.
Currently every office maintains their own records, and now, when the data is already being updated is a good time to unify these databases, saving money and creating a better system for users, he explained. The government is not doing this, and each office is maintaining its own records, he said.
When you think about how many citizens there are in Israel, this means a huge amount of duplicated data, said Milstein.
It makes sense that government offices would be reluctant to give up control of their own database, he said, adding that this would mean cutting staff and budgets, as well as having less say over how the database is built.
"If I was managing a ministry's data center I wouldn't give up on it. If today I am managing 50 people, why would I give up on it?" he asked.
"Why would I give up my budget of millions of shekels? I will give up on flying abroad with my suppliers?"
This kind of data management would be unthinkable in the private sector, he added, saying that no chain of multiple companies or factories would allow each branch to keep separated data.
Unifying the data would not only allow offices to downsize teams, saving these costs as well as the cost of maintaining redundant data, it would also enable better cyber protection for the data, which could all be defended as one data set, he said.
Informatica offers data management products including in the fields of data integration, data quality, data security, customer 360, master data management, and many more.