Ministry of Economy and Finance of Cambodia

Accelerating public services, improving workforce productivity, and reducing costs

In preparation for its digital transformation, the MEF plans to build and upgrade electronic public financial and tax management systems, including financial management software, e-payment systems, electronic tax management systems, and mobile applications. Applications and systems deployed in this digital transformation strategy will enable people and businesses to execute financial and tax transactions online, saving time and expenses that would otherwise be spent on transportation and printing documents.

The transformation is an ongoing process to be carried out in several phases in collaboration with selected technology providers to best benefit the country's government, people, and businesses.

In the immediate future, the MEF's top priority is to establish a resource center with high-speed access and secure two-way connections to external parties and, at the same time, develop a unified communication system for all of its staff.

To reach these objectives, the MEF chose Cisco as one of its technology providers in the digital transformation.

Solutions for an endemic problem

The significant transformation brought by Cisco HyperFlex Systems in the MEF's provision of public service has created an improved service chain. The traditional technology solutions and limited infrastructure earlier employed by the MEF failed to meet the rapidly growing demand for public financial services by the public and other agencies. With the support of HyperFlex Systems, the MEF has experienced improvements in both performance and service quality. Specifically, ministries, branches, and other agencies across the country can now have instant and secure access to online services through the Financial Management Information System (FMIS), allowing state budget revenues and expenditures to be handled securely and in a timely manner. Currently, the MEF manages to provide services to more than 2700 institutional and corporate customers and over 1500 other entities using HyperFlex infrastructure.

As a result of the improvements, the time required for the creation and operation of new network environments has been reduced from days to a few hours. Management tools have been centralized for more efficiency, allowing the IT team to manage, allocate, and troubleshoot in real time. The HyperFlex solution has also tripled the MEF's data warehousing capacity.

A representative of the MEF's IT team states: "In the future, we may not need to spare space to expand the data center. Moreover, with HyperFlex our data center now has reduced noise levels, and we have significantly lowered energy costs by up to 50 percent. With new compression and copying technologies, we can invest more in safe data warehousing and processing. Also, the search speed is 1.5 times faster."

Using automation to simplify and streamline

The Cisco ACI solution is used to manage network systems with software-defined networking (SDN), which supports the management of complex network systems through automation. Since applying the Cisco ACI solution, the MEF has increased operational efficiency. Therefore, security for the MEF is enhanced on premises as well as in the cloud.

Cisco Intersight services intelligently optimize and synchronize all applications and infrastructure in a hybrid IT environment, supporting existing applications in the MEF's infrastructure and meeting the high computing speed requirements of new applications. Powered by data analytics and machine learning, Cisco Intersight services help the MEF's IT systems achieve higher levels of automation with simpler operations and superior operational performance.

By analyzing collected data, Cisco Intersight services will continuously learn from the MEF's operational activities, incorporate specific contexts to become smarter, and then recommend advisable technical tools for the MEF's decisions when required.

Secure, reliable email

To help ensure the safety and security of email, the MEF is using Cisco Secure Email Threat Defense. All sent emails are scanned for viruses and protected according to internal and external security regulations. Incoming emails are filtered to reduce spam and are scanned for suspicious IP addresses, phishing attempts, viruses, malicious codes, and other threats.

Regarding the implementation of Cisco solutions in the MEF's digital transformation process, Mr. Kimsrang Nget, Director of Information Technology Research and Development, General Department of Public Financial Management Information Technology, says: "Cisco has helped us build a secure platform and strong infrastructure, offering great experiences to our users and agencies. These excellent achievements have increased the transparency and simplification of the Ministry's digital infrastructure operations and management, benefiting all users." 

Reportedly, the Royal Government of Cambodia has pioneered the Cambodian Digital Government Policy 2022–2035 with an eye toward establishing digital government to improve the people's quality of life and to build trust by providing higher-quality public services. The MEF has set a precedent for other ministries and branches in Cambodia in choosing Cisco as a technology provider for its technology investment model.