Cloud powers Indonesia's public service continuity

Service availability without the risk of downtime and scalability are the main reasons for government agencies in Indonesia to move to the cloud.

"For us in government, the cloud allows us to interact quickly, navigate large traffic, and ensure the continuity of electronic systems and public services," said the Ministry of Primary and Secondary Education's Head of Centre for Data and Information Technology, Yudhistira Nugraha.  

According to Yudhistira, the latest regulation requires every public agency that runs a core service to ensure its constant availablity. If the core service goes down, it harms users and reduces potential state revenue, he added.  

Yudhistira was speaking at the panel session Innovations in the Secure Cloud: Balancing Transformation and Trust at the AWS Public Sector Leadership Innovation Exchange event in Jakarta on March 13. 

Other speakers on the panel were BPJS Kesehatan’s President Director, Ali Ghufron Mukti, and the Ministry of Immigration and Correction's Deputy Director of IT Maintenance and Security, Berthi Mustika. The panel was moderated by AWS Government Account Lead, Muhamad Yopan.    

Yudhistira said that the Ministry of Education is using the cloud to usher in innovation in the education sector.

The ministry developed a digital platform for teachers with more than four million users and is currently developing a separate platform for students with a target user base of 50 million.  

With such a large number of users, migration from on- premise to cloud was absolutely necessary, he noted.   

"We need to make sure the service operates optimally for 24 hours a day. There is no such thing as ‘service under maintenance’ in public services," Yudhistira said. 

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Helping the public sector focus on service improvement  

The Ministry of Immigration and Corrections' Berthi said the cloud has given organisations the flexibility to focus on improving services delivered to the public and the departments need not bother about infrastructure and security issues. 

According to Berthi, his agency utilises cloud-based infrastructure-as-a-service, security-as-a-service, and platform-as-a-service.

"Currently, all immigration services operate entirely through the cloud, except for data backup which is still used on premise data centres," Berthi said. 

When it comes to core immigration services, the cloud helps operate autogate lanes at international airports around-the-clock without any downtime. Before migrating to the cloud, the autogate service was often offline at certain times due to system maintenance, said Berthi. 

He recounted his agency's journey to migrate to the cloud after a ransomware attack on the Temporary National Data Centre (PDNS) last year, which disrupted autogate services for two days. The disruption also took the m-passport and eVisa application systems offline.  

Following the incident, all immigration services previously running on PDNS were moved to the cloud. Berthi claimed that in the 10 months since the PDNS incident, there has been no downtime in immigration services.

Cloud security and compliance 

Berthi said that the cloud provides security support at every layer that organisations need to work effectively and ensure their services run without interruption.

He added that the eVisa application service on the immigration website, when first launched, came under a Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack for two consecutive days. The attack flooded the server with approximately 16 million fake traffic users that almost caused access disruption. 

“The website will definitely go down if it is run in an on-premise data centre. However, because it is operated using the cloud, our services remain safe,” he said.  

Yudhistira also highlighted that security guarantees by cloud providers are crucial if the government wants to accelerate its transformation.  

As the government emphasises on service development, disruptions such as DDoS attacks should be easy to navigate in future due to the services being on the cloud.   

However, what was also important was how service providers could ensure that government data stored in the cloud remained safe.   

"In the context of cloud security, we need to improve our ability to deal with evolving cyber threats," he said.  

Compliance is also important. Following the cyberattack incident at PDNS, the Ministry of Communications and Digital has made it mandatory for every government electronic system provider to back up its data.   

"This obligation is a challenge for cloud users ... to what extent can service providers help us facilitate the data backup process more quickly and easily," Yudhistira added. 

Optimising the cloud's potential 

BPJS Kesehatan's Ghufron highlighted the impact of cloud on innovation in the healthcare sector, enabling more efficient service delivery, reduced queue times at hospitals, and facilitating remote treatments.

However, all these advancements were meaningless if the services were not optimally utilised by more people. He pointed out that of the 278 million national health insurance participants, BPJS Kesehatan's digital health service, Mobile JKN, has only been accessed by 44 million participants.  

"People's digital literacy must be improved, especially in terms of optimising the digital services provided to them." 

In his welcome address, AWS’ Head of ASEAN Growth Market, Julian Lau, invited Indonesian government agencies to innovate by using Generative AI (GenAI) to improve performance, drive efficiency and personalise services. AWS cloud infrastructure enabled organisations to securely run AI models at scale and with enhanced performance, Lau said. 

He also underlined AWS’ commitment to help Indonesia's public sector and to comply with Indonesian regulations. This included the guarantee of storing and processing data in AWS local data centres in Indonesia, providing training for 800,000 students and workers, and investing in the establishment of data centres powered by clean energy.