A project to standardize the business systems that local governments have individually developed and move them to the government-provided cloud environment "Government Cloud" is running aground. Many local governments are seeing expenses increase, even though they should have seen a reduction. Over 90% of the projects are expected to use Governance Cloud, provided by Amazon, which poses the risk of becoming dependent on foreign capital. Furthermore, 40% of the projects are unlikely to meet the migration deadline at the end of March.
Until now, local governments across the country have developed their business systems separately. The 2021 Standardization Act requires all 1,788 local governments to switch to standardized systems in accordance with national specifications. This applies to 20 business operations, including the Basic Resident Register, National Pension, Voter Register Management, Public Assistance, Property Tax, and Child Allowance.
Based on the specifications, local governments will order system development from vendors. The selling point is that local governments will no longer need to re-create specifications themselves every time a system change occurs, which will lead to a reduction in workload.
The national government emphasizes that using Government cloud will reduce operational costs by 30%. However, a growing number of local governments are complaining that operational costs will increase. The national government originally provided 774.1 billion yen in subsidies to local governments to cover the transition costs. Following criticism, the government decided to subsidize operational costs as well, and included 70 billion yen in subsidies in the supplementary budget at the end of last year.
As of the end of September last year, there were 1,397 local governments that were either using or had decided to use Government cloud. Of these, 96.4% (1,347 local governments) chose AWS, the cloud service from Amazon, a U.S. company that has been nationally approved as a Government cloud service. The remaining 3.6% are also U.S. companies. With a court warrant, the U.S. government can request that U.S. companies disclose information about non-U.S. persons stored outside the United States.
by MagazineKey4532