Ideas Festival – 2021: One Click State
At the Ideas Festival – 2021, a panel discussion “The State in one click: the path to digitalization” was held. It was dedicated to the development of the Ukrainian “digital state”, technologies and services that are increasingly integrated into our lives. The participants paid special attention to cybersecurity issues.
The speakers of the event were Alfa-Bank Ukraine IT director Andrii Hrytseniuk, Deputy Head of the State Service for Special Communications and Information Protection of Ukraine Viktor Zhora, and AppDynamics/Cisco regional manager Olga Kobrina. The discussion was moderated by Oleg Derevyanko, co-founder and chairman of the Board of Directors of ISPP (Information System Security Partners).
According to Andrii Hrytseniuk, the main trend that determines and will continue to determine the success of services and products is their ability to simplify people’s lives. You can tentatively say “services for lazy people”. This applies to both the state and the banking sector, which it represents. Moreover, this is the general trend.
— Technologies in general and specific services that appear every month greatly simplify the lives of Ukrainians. Those products that are not very noticeable to people, but allow them to remain in a state of comfort, without exerting too much effort on themselves, are and will continue to be successful. As a citizen, I don’t want to get up from the sofa. I want services to be available in one or more clicks.
Viktor Zhora provided statistics on downloads of the “Diia” application. At the time of the discussion, this indicator was approximately 6 million users. According to Victor, it might make sense to set a goal of 15 — 20 million downloads.
— The appearance of “Diia” is certainly a positive phenomenon. It will be possible to talk about success in a broader sense after the service becomes more popular. For this, an ecosystem is needed: now someone may not have access to devices to download the application, and someone’s locality simply lacks stable Internet. The Ministry of Digital Transformation comes up with initiatives that “feed” this ecosystem. For example, there is a project to spread the Internet to remote parts of our country. More than 90 digital transformation projects have also been launched.
Cybersecurity became a separate topic of discussion. Its development is a constant, daily work. For example, about 50,000 cyberattacks are carried out on state resources every week. Oleg Derevyanko compared cyber security with human health:
— There is no guarantee that no one will ever get sick. The question is how quickly the disease will be detected, how to counteract it and prevent diseases in the future.
Olga Kobrina singled out three components of cyber security. Very important in this context is the educational component, which will allow people to effectively use the available technologies.
— When talking about cyber security, 3 aspects must be taken into account: technologies that can protect the application code and detect certain vulnerabilities, education of people and their ability to work with these technologies, as well as processes. People and processes are currently the weak points.
Ideas Festival — 2021 was held by Aspen Institute Kyiv together with Impact Hub Odessa.
