Cisco Thailand lends support to govt's goal of a 'digital economy'

Cisco Systems (Thailand) says it could contribute in various ways to ensure the success of the government’s “digital economy” idea and believes Thailand is already in a digital world.

The company said the Kingdom was not far behind other countries in this aspect, but the crucial part that was still missing was a more “connected digital economy”.

“Thailand has to find a way to connect all the digital solutions that the country has been using,” said Vatsun Thirapatarapong, Cisco’s managing director in Thailand. 

“For example, if someone has lost his or her wallet, that person should be able to go to one counter to get all the important identification back. Or we could come up with an application called ‘the lost wallet’ through which the person could apply for all the important IDs from one automated single window instead of going to various authorities and agencies to apply for all of them, one at a time. 

“The digital economy might not be the answer, but a connected digital economy that combines all the solutions together and centralises it could be the answer, as it would enable a better user experience for everyone,” he said.

Vatsun suggested that the use of a cloud platform could help connect all the existing digital solutions together, and the government move to create infrastructure in five categories – hard, soft, and service infrastructure, promotion and innovation, and society and knowledge – were steps in the right direction.

“The idea to connect all the government agencies together by digitising them would allow the ‘digital economy’ idea to happen, because all government networks are currently separated. Of course, you can link all of them together through the Internet, but it would not be effective, so we have to find a way for them to connect together in one national broadband,” he said.

 

Security 

The soft infrastructure is meant to support the hard infrastructure, especially in terms of security. Cisco wants to see the government form a “national cyber-security blueprint”, as each government agency is currently working with its own security team and there is no unity in terms of watching out for attacks from the cyber-world, Vatsun said.

As for service infrastructure, he said this segment needed collaboration with technology that would allow all agencies to work together via video, audio, and Web conferencing in one secure platform. That is unlike the use of public applications such as Dropbox, where there are questions regarding the security of the data being shared on the Internet, he said.

“Security solutions require collaboration that will allow a connected experience for each government agency, and if the service infrastructures are in place, we can easily extend the ‘digital economy’ idea through the use of cloud service,” he said.

Meanwhile, a cloud platform for use and collaboration of government agencies should be set up within the country, as all the current public cloud-service providers are outside. There is a chance that state information could leak to the outside world if the government does not provide incentives, especially tax breaks, for these providers to come to invest and open a cloud platform and security services within the country, Vatsun said.

A national digital committee should also be set up to provide clarity in terms of which agency would be in charge of doing what in the planning and implementation of the digital solutions that would make the digital-economy idea actually happen, he said.

Nevertheless, if the proposed National Digital Committee is set up, Cisco “hopes that the government would not shut out the private sector from helping the government create the digital economy, as places like Hong Kong and Singapore all use the private and public-partnership model and structure to help them in their national digital set-up,” he concluded.