DIGITAL STRATEGIES FOR A SAFE & SECURE DATA DRIVEN SOCIETY

Our nation has been trying to find the right path towards becoming an all-inclusive digital society where innovative services are leveraged on available infrastructures and digital platforms. New technological developments and applications are speeding up internationally while national initiatives are lagging behind, creating a worrisome digital gap with the rest of the world. We must start now with the right approach, as digitalization is a long process with huge impact across all sectors and citizens of our community. Many plans, roadmaps, policies, and strategies have been drafted and proposed throughout the years. Nevertheless, the right decision making, action-based approach and implementation were missing.

Data-driven and People-Centric

Digitalization is a fundamental aspect for a true national transformation into an all-inclusive digital society. Embracing digital development should be approached as a national strategy by leveraging new electronic communication infrastructures with synchronized digital platforms and innovative services. Serving from the heart should be the main objective to cater to needs of the citizens, businesses, needs, the educational institutions, and all other relevant sectors within our community. We must become a data-driven society, but with a “people-centric” approach, and start to walk towards digital transformation to build an up-scaled digital economy and socially balanced society in support of Smart Nation Curaçao.

Drivers of Change

The COVID-19 pandemic has helped the acceleration of basic digitalization and adoption of internet services in several organizations. However, we are far from reaching our goals. We are entering a new era of Big Data and Artificial Intelligence which will change the future and the way we do our everyday work. We must prioritize on the adaptation and upscaling of infrastructures, the alignment and synchronization of digital platforms, effective usage of already available data and the introduction of new innovative services. At the same time, we must increase our focus on the continual ups-killing of workers, adjusting to working more effectively across agencies and the preparation for the new challenges of the future-of-work. All of this with security and privacy by design in mind.

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The strategic integration of Cyber Security & Privacy Regulation

 

With the acceleration of the digitalization of government services and critical infrastructures, protection of digital devices became increasingly important. On the other side, cyber-attacks against such organizations are still growing, and made it a high priority for the government’s critical infrastructures to be resilient against any form of cyber-attack and cybercrime. So, it is unthinkable to move towards digitalization without considering a collective approach towards cybersecurity. Cybersecurity is an integral part of this development to guarantee confidentiality, integrity, availability, and overall data privacy.

Meanwhile, the European Union is taking big steps towards shaping their digital future over the rest of the world by introducing the Data Act and Data Governance Act. The Data Act is a regulation for harmonized rules on fair access to and use of data. It’s a key measure for making data available for use by end-users and enterprises and it clarifies who can create value from data and under which conditions. The Data Governance Act on the other hand stipulates the processes and structures to facilitate data and as such will increase trust in data sharing, strengthen mechanisms to increase data availability and overcome technical obstacles to the reuse of data * . A crucial milestone is to improve how we work by utilizing available data and deliver digital services while harnessing new technologies in a centralized digital environment.

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* Digital Strategy EU

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