Estonia among top 3 in the UN e-Government Survey 2020

July 2020

In the recent UN e-Government Survey 2020 that rates 193 UN Member States in terms of digital government, Estonia ranks among the top three most digitally advanced countries together with Denmark and the Republic of Korea. Estonia recorded the most significant e-Government Development Index increase from 16th place in 2018 to 3rd place this year. In the e-Participation Index, Estonia is ranked 1st in the world.

The survey captures the scope and quality of online services, the status of telecommunications, and existing human capacity. Over the past ten editions, the survey has become widely recognised as a leading benchmarking reference on e-government development.

The main part of the e-Government Survey deals with the state of e-government development around the world and in this section, Estonia ranks 3rd. The methodology focuses on 19 key metrics, 13 of which deal with strategies and legal as well as institutional frameworks.

Participation is a key dimension of governance and one of the pillars of sustainable development. The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development highlights the importance of participatory processes. Through the survey, e-participation is assessed on the basis of features of national e-government portals and other government websites that relate to the provision of information to citizens; consultation; and decision-making. Estonia is the country that ranks highest in the 2020 e-Participation Index, ahead of South Korea and the United States.

Estonia is considered one of the fastest rising countries for digital transformation in the world. The citizens in Estonia can do basically anything online except for getting married or divorced. “The jump from 16th place to 3rd in e-Governance and our highest rank in e-Participation shows that Estonia has been on the right track in building a resilient digital society,” stated Siim Sikkut, Government CIO of the Republic of Estonia. “But there’s always work to be done to continue ahead of the curve in digital development and we have to acknowledge that benchmarks like the UN’s show things in the rearview mirror,” Sikkut added. “We are already working on the next solutions in e-Estonia, be it proactive services or making our government AI-driven.”

“The pandemic has renewed and anchored the role of digital government – both in its conventional delivery of digital services as well as new innovative efforts in managing the crisis,” Mr. Liu Zhenmin, UN Under‑Secretary-General for Economic and Social Affairs, said in the survey, adding: “Partnerships are more important than ever, between governments and the private sector, and among countries in the same region or across national digital government teams.”

Thanks to Estonia’s collective response to the crisis – both by our government and IT companies – the continuity and resilience of its public services remained unchanged and Estonia has been regarded as one of the best nations to cope with crises. Estonia is also very open to sharing it’s experience and knowledge in digitalisation, especially when it comes to bridging the widening the digital divide between and within countries.

That is why the Estonian state created the e-Estonia Briefing Centre where its unique digital society and e-solutions have been shared with more than sixty governments and its solutions exported to over 130 countries around the world. To name a few examples – launching digital prescriptions in Japan; more effective tax filing in Finland; building secure data exchange for US telecoms; developing the e-government infrastructure in Ukraine and building the world’s fastest company creation e-service in Oman. The e-Estonia Briefing Centre hosts impactful events both in-person and online for government institutions, companies and media. Through this, the centre shares e-Estonia best practices and builds links to leading Estonian IT-companies and state experts that help build digital ecosystems and national resilience all over the world.

The UN E-Government Survey, published by the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UN DESA), is prepared over a two-year period. The Survey measures e-government effectiveness in the delivery of public services and identifies patterns in e-government development and performance as well as countries and areas where the potential of Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) and e-government has not yet been fully exploited and where capacity development support might be helpful. It looks at how the digital government can facilitate integrated policies and services across 193 UN Member States.

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Today, e-governance and e-services have become a necessity in every country. e-Estonia Briefing Centre – the gateway to Estonian expertise in e-governance, invites you to connect with the Estonian IT companies directly responsible for the successful functioning of the e-state even during a pandemic. Get in touch with us to set up your custom programme with the best partners you could get: business.e-estonia@eas.ee

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Photo: UN e-Government Survey 2020

Resource: e-estonia

Estonia’s capital Tallinn as a testbed for smart city solution providers

July 2020

by Dea Paraskevopoulos

Almost a year ago the city of Tallinn employed its very first CIO, Toomas Türk, who rolled up his sleeves and created its Smart City agenda for the next few years. The main goal is to dream, and act, big. “We want to become the leading center of smart city and innovation among the smaller capitals in the world,” Türk says. 

One of the first fruits of Türk’s labour is an engagement platform for startups, smart city solution providers, and seekers called Tallinnovation. “The concept behind Tallinnovation is – think globally, test in Tallinn. Our network varies from industrial parks to incubators, from global events to world-known universities. I see the future potential of cities by focusing on data, health, education, and cybersecurity,” Toomas Türk says.

Tallinn’s first-ever CIO reveals his ambition to become the leading centre of smart city and innovation among the smaller capitals in the world. “We aim to set an example for other cities as the most awesome and digitally liveable city in the world,” Türk says, adding: “The focus is now on data management for better decision making and capacity building for all the smart city initiatives we have in the works.”

Pandemic digitalised the City Council meetings

Of course, the global healthcare crisis highlighted new needs that were not normally worth thinking about, in the city management, too. One such example was the development of digital solutions necessary for the electronic organisation of Tallinn City Council meetings. It was clear at the very beginning of the emergency that the work of the Council as the highest political body in the capital cannot be stopped, because many issues that needed to be decided quickly fall within the exclusive competence of the council. Be it a temporary exemption from the location of a kindergarten, a free right to travel for non-residents during an emergency, or other measures that the city government proposed to alleviate the crisis. It was not possible to start holding electronic sessions immediately due to the lack of the necessary technological solutions. They hadn’t just been needed before. It was also unclear at the outset whether holding sessions electronically was legal.

Therefore, at the end of March, it was agreed with the political groups represented in the council that, in order to prevent the spread of the virus, only one representative from each political group would initially attend the meetings. The electronic voting system, which was introduced merely a month later, now allows for the full organisation of council meetings electronically, if necessary. Council members who have logged in to the road with an ID card or mobile ID can register their wishes to speak at the agenda items, vote securely on all decisions and verify the correctness of the vote.

Snowbots, self-driving buses, and autonomous delivery boats

There are already quite a few cool smart city projects implemented in Tallinn. For example, city planning uses a very large number of state-of-the-art geo-information solutions. The entire planning process is integrated with high-quality map applications, online databases, and analytics capabilities. BIM (Building Information Management) and VDC (Virtual Design and Construction) methods and technologies are used to carry out the city’s own construction.

Last year, TalTech Institute of Software Science and OÜ Thinnect developed a technology to monitor urban air and measure traffic flows. The 900 batteries and solar panel sensors attached to the street lighting posts in Tallinn will start collecting environmental and traffic data. The project could in the future help to reduce congestion and noise and thereby create a friendlier cityscape.

In collaboration with startups, Lumebot (=Snowbot, lumi means snow in Estonian) was born, a bot meant for snow removal, street cleaning and street sweeping. “One robot to clean the street throughout four seasons,” describes Türk. Then there are the self-driving electrical minibuses that are being tested in several parts of the city for some years now. The idea is to use them as a part of the public transport system or in car-free zones like hospital areas, parks, and zoos. Similarly to the self-driving buses, there’s Iselaev, an autonomous delivery or transport boat because Tallinn is, after all, a city by the sea. This boat meant for smaller and on-demand cargo needs can become handy in transporting waste from the many islands near the capital.

And last, but certainly not the least – the city now has a Future City Professor working at TalTech and her name is Jenni Partanen. This smart city professor is focusing on work and living environment research and all this is financed by the private sector (including Mainor Ülemiste, Technopolis Ülemiste, Ericsson, and Telia) with about half a million euros over five years.

Factsheet: Tallinn – Financial, Business and Tourism capital of Estonia

• Population: Tallinn 445 024 / Estonia 1 328 976
• GDP per capita 32 880 EUR
• 4.6M visitors
• 24 enterprises per 100 residents
• 700 startups
• Fitch AA-stable
• Seaport and startup hub
• Active labour force 250 000
• Global Top 500 University, Science Park
• No 1 Sharing Economy Index
• No 1 Emerging Europe Smart City Development 2020
• Top finalist for Green Capital Europe 2022
• Top finalist for Intelligent Communities Forum Awards 2020
• Top 3 Innovation Capital of Europe 2017
• Top 5 in FDI mid-sized European cities

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Today, e-governance and e-services have become a necessity in every country. e-Estonia Briefing Centre – the gateway to Estonian expertise in e-governance, invites you to connect with the Estonian IT companies directly responsible for the successful functioning of the e-state even during a pandemic. Get in touch with us to set up your custom virtual programme with the best partners you could get: business.e-estonia@eas.ee

Resouce: e-estonia

Guardtime: Moving from trust to truth in the cloud and 5G

July 2020

by Adhele Tuulas

creative assistantshare

While the adoption of cloud computing continues to be the fastest growing area of IT spending, there are a number of security-related concerns that have not been sufficiently addressed to unlock the advantages of cloud to public and highly regulated sectors.

Guardtime – the company behind the pioneering KSI Blockchain, which is deployed in most Estonian government networks – helps enterprises and governments to regain the control and oversight of their virtualised infrastructure. While also mitigating the related threats and fears that still hold back many organisations from  realising  the huge potential of the cloud, 5G and everything else virtualised and outsourced in their infrastructure.

We caught up with Luukas Ilves, Head of Strategy at Guardtime, to better understand the essence of cloud vulnerabilities and shed light on the value that Guardtime’s new cloud security solution MIDA provides in combating this challenge.

To set the scene, could you briefly explain, what is the essence of the security risk when it comes to cloud adoption?

The fundamental problem is that the cloud is someone else’s computer. On the one hand, that is why the cloud is great – it provides an opportunity to outsource complexity. But this also means that you have taken an internal operation, which is essentially your core business process, and put it in the cloud. You therefore have a new trust problem, because in a way, now someone else owns your core business process.

Adding on to that, cloud has become increasingly more virtualised. Everything is a configuration. And too much harm can be done by misconfigurations – accidental or malicious.

If you move away from the cloud’s most basic function of storage, you get into further layers of complexity. Detecting and reacting to misconfigurations is becoming increasingly more difficult for cybersecurity teams.

Or as we have put it – you are looking for a needle in a haystack, that is in someone else’s barn, that you can inspect only on weekends. This is of course an oversimplification, but helps illustrate the gap between the owner of the process and what is actually happening to the bits and bytes in the cloud.

That space between how you see your process and what is happening physically, is being run by the cloud service provider. You don’t have full insight into what is going on there. Today, you just need to trust them and your own system administrators. And your auditors, your partners, your clients – they all must trust you. This creates space for all sorts of security problems to arise, often strong enough to block great cloud aspirations for many organisations.

As the cloud hides the complexity of running a very complex computing infrastructure, it also hides a lot of the security information. And that is where the trust problem arises.

Guardtime’s offering for cloud security (as well as other cutting-edge technology from 5G to IoT) is MIDA. What is the background of this product?

MIDA came into the picture when we saw some of the difficulties our customers were having with deploying traditional cybersecurity solutions for protecting their ever-virtualising digital infrastructures and assets. Such tools excelled well in complicated systems – i.e. linearly growing scale of processes and data that were supported by on-premise infrastructure. But today, the cloud-based world needs tools that are fit for complex systems. Tools that operate on new principles and more efficiently. Tools that seek and find new patterns and stay on top of ever-changing systems in real-time.

Solving “complex” challenges with tools built for the “complicated” era just means an endless increase of required resources, costs and problems for organisations. Through this, we realised that Guardtime’s core technology actually gives us a way to solve this “cloud is someone else’s computer” problem in a fairly new and creative way.

The underlying foundation of MIDA is the following: everything happening in a cloud that you care about, is a state. Whether that is the configuration of a machine or the actual physical state of a drive within a server, etc. The way that cloud security works now, is you receive logs, provided by the cloud service provider, and they tell you what those states are. You (selectively) analyse those logs by looking for discrepancies and security flaws. Once you discover something, you can react to it. (This is a solution from the time when systems were complicated).

We understood that using our very scalable data integrity architecture, we could actually do that state monitoring in the cloud more efficiently and productively than current methods. Therefore, instead of waiting for me to get those logs out of the cloud and then doing the assessment – this allows you to have an automated machine to sit in the cloud, do the monitoring for you (for everything, not selectively), and tell you if things have changed. (This is a solution for the time when things have gotten complex).

Once you have this ongoing stream of updates about the state of information in the cloud, it makes it a lot easier to do the type of security monitoring that tells you what is actually going on in the cloud. And all those state captures that MIDA makes are signed immediately with KSI Blockchain, you know that the information coming out of the cloud is the immutable truth and it is an immediate reflection of what the physical machines are doing.

You can therefore paint a picture of your cloud deployment and its current state, which is a lot richer than what the cloud service itself would tell you. And that starts closing this gap of the cloud being someone else’s computer.

But, what sets Guardtime’s MIDA apart from other similar solutions?

Of course, we are not the only people that let you monitor your cloud and provide insight into what is going on. What is unique about Guardtime is that we can manage the ever-increasing scale while maintaining a reasonable cost level.

The cloud is producing huge amounts of information and to know everything that is going on, your monitoring solution should be as complex and as big as your cloud. Right now, if you look at traditional log analysis, people set up massive cloud deployments just to hold the logs of their cloud. These are essentially just a bunch of data sitting, waiting to be analysed. And the more you analyse, the more you pay.

What Guardtime does in the cloud deployment is ask if the state has changed and run that check once a second or at any other defined interval. Because the running of that check is secured on our integrity layer, and it is thereby provable, we only need to export information when something changes. 

The amount of information that your cloud is monitoring therefore becomes a lot more manageable. And when you do get an alert out of it, you know it is something you really need to act on. Finding those needles in that haystack, at the right time, becomes much easier, faster and cost-efficient with MIDA.

In building MIDA, you did a lot of work with Verizon, one of the largest management security providers in the world. What did this collaboration entail?

With Verizon we built out a deployment of certain components of MIDA for cloud, called the MSI – Machine State Integrity. We started our partnership a couple of years ago and they really helped us understand the business requirements that large corporations have around the cloud.

Verizon has also been one of the early adopters of 5G and has deployed a fairly big footprint in 5G infrastructure in the US. They have had to work through the specifics of how to apply this state awareness and ongoing monitoring to 5G.

Speaking of 5G, how can Guardtime’s MIDA then address some of the 5G security concerns?

For a little bit of background on 5G. What cloud has allowed you to do is transition from needing specialised hardware to now having general cloud hardware. So, in the past, if you built a 4G network, you needed very specific, unique 4G equipment. Whereas now if you are building a 5G network, a lot more of what you are actually doing to run the network, just looks like the general cloud.

Historically, providers of networking equipment, (such as Ericsson, Nokia, etc) have also had specialised hardware security. You would purchase the equipment, it would be yours and you could do whatever you need from certification to penetration testing. Now we’re in an era where 5G itself is almost run as a cloud service and the manufacturer of the equipment is to some extent involved in running that. So, a lot of 5G networks actually provide not just the physical hardware but also the software solution of a service on top of that.

This means that there is suddenly a new trust dependency. As a telecoms operator, for example, I do not just have to trust the physical equipment provider once to give me secure equipment that does not have a backdoor. I actually have to have an ongoing trust relationship, where I trust them to properly run the security, to update and patch things and to ultimately not, at a future point in time, introduce a backdoor.

That is the reason why suddenly with 5G we have this question of Huawei equipment, that we did not have with 4G or 3G. Theoretically, Huawei – or any other provider for that matter – could open a backdoor at some point in the future, use that to run an attack and then close it again and leave no trace of what has happened.

You need a new and different way of doing security. This paradigm of having an ongoing awareness and knowing the truth of what’s going on with your machines also becomes important for 5G.

And Guardtime’s MIDA is up for the challenge.

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Today, e-governance and e-services have become a necessity in every country. e-Estonia Briefing Centre – the gateway to Estonian expertise in e-governance, invites you to connect with the Estonian IT companies directly responsible for the successful functioning of the e-state even during a pandemic. Get in touch with us to set up your custom virtual programme with the best partners you could get: business.e-estonia@eas.ee

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Photo by Johannes Plenio from Pexels

Resource: e-estonia

e-Estonia live: Digital friends – Estonia and Finland

July 2020

by Adhele Tuulas

creative assistant

The e-Estonia Live webinar series is hosted weekly on our e-Estonia Facebook page, where we connect with Estonian state experts and company representatives to discuss current issues and the developments within e-Estonia.

Back in 2013, the world’s first digitally signed international agreement was signed between the Prime Ministers of Estonia and Finland, Andrus Ansip and Jyrki Katainen. This agreement was the Memorandum of Understanding, which established the formal cooperation for “developing and maintaining a software environment enabling secure connectivity, searches and data transfers between various governmental and private databases” – X-Road.

Currently, Estonia and Finland have a well-established system for health data exchange and a growing number of services added to the X-Road ecosystem. To discuss this cooperation between the two digital partners, we brought together Taavi Rõivas, Member of the Estonian Parliament and Former Prime Minister of Estonia and Ville Sirviö, CEO of Nordic Institute of Interoperability Solutions (NIIS).

What are the prerequisites for establishing data exchange between two or more countries? How did the partnership between Estonia and Finland get started and what did it entail? What would it take to achieve digital data exchange on a European level? And what is the role of trust in all this, from the government level down to the citizen? These, and many more questions, were covered in the insightful discussion facilitated by our Digital Transformation Adviser, Anett Numa.

Watch the recording for the full discussion:Video Player00:0001:05:38

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Today, e-governance and e-services have become a necessity in every country. e-Estonia Briefing Centre – the gateway to Estonian expertise in e-governance, invites you to connect with the Estonian IT companies directly responsible for the successful functioning of the e-state even during a pandemic. Get in touch with us to set up your custom virtual programme with the best partners you could get: business.e-estonia@eas.ee

Resource: e-estonia