Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/1068299
16 maltatoday | SUNDAY • 6 JANUARY 2019 TRAVEL MITA, in its role to assist Government implement and support its digital agenda has constantly invested to maintain our data centre in- frastructure, systems and services to address the ever changing public sector busi- ness needs. 2018, however, saw an extraordinary invest- ment in technology, funded through a mix of local and EU funds. This investment has triggered an overhaul within its data centre technology platform and has enabled the path for the modernisation and transformation of legacy systems. MITA's long-term strategy for Government systems is to make use and maximise the benefits of current and emerging digital technologies. Its aim is to repeat its suc- cess in e-Government services amongst our peer European countries, but also to have a showcase of public service so- lutions and services for citizen and the business. 2019 is thus a year of op- portunities and exciting chal- lenges. MITA aims to be first in the region to deploy new data centre computing infra- structure based on the emerg- ing hybrid cloud paradigm. Its chosen enterprise hybrid cloud solution for Govern- ment is based on Microsoft Azure and Azure Stack plat- form, which will give it the capability to address the ev- er-increasing demand of the Government's ambitious digi- tal strategy. The solution offers a mix of on-premise public and private cloud infrastructure environ- ments to cater for diverse hosting needs and require- ments. This hybrid cloud solution will allow MITA to build cloud native applica- tions and bring into its data centre, cloud features such as cloud bursting. This is a con- figuration which provides for the automatic scaling of re- sources and if necessary also burst between the private and public cloud to cater for peak computing demands. This has to be applied with the due consideration of security and compliance requirements, latency, load balancing and platform compatibility. The solution also empow- ers consumers to make use of self-service provisioning and management of infrastruc- ture, including Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Plat- form as a Service (PaaS). This approach will further empow- er Ministry CIOs to capitalise on the advantages of hybrid cloud, facilitating the provi- sion of computing resources and build environments on demand, through self-servic- es and scaling to fit business needs. MITA also embarked on the unprecedented opportunity to modernise legacy systems and reengineering them into cloud native solutions, opening the way to embrace emerging technologies in areas such as taxation, social security, etc., creating an innovative im- pulse for digital transforma- tion. Through the drive for the modernisation of legacy sys- tems MITA is seeking to re- architect solutions to benefit from the new hybrid cloud platform, using modern devel- opment approaches - DevOps and Microservices. These practices, together with pro- gramming concepts that fa- cilitates interoperability and design modularity such as ap- plication programming inter- faces (APIs), will offer greater agility and operational effi- ciencies, making the solution more resilient to the digital transformation journey. MITA will also be invest- ing in cybersecurity tools that leverage Artificial Intelligence (AI) capabilities to smarter recognise and predict cyber- attacks. The use of AI algo- rithms will empower our se- curity engineers to focus more on strategic and threat reduc- ing initiatives. The use of AI in conjunction with solutions that facilitate automation and orchestration will further en- hance our Security Opera- tions Centre (SOC) to timely adapt to protect against the ever increasing complexities of today's threats. The Whole-of-Government will see the implementation of the Modern Workplace ini- tiative, which will involve the rollout of a modern desktop with Microsoft 365 – across Windows, Office 365 ProPlus and Enterprise Management & Security. The modern desk- top environment will enable users with an empowering and secure workspace that is powered by the latest produc- MITA's vision for the new year