The Government of Spain launches the National Cloud Services Strategy for Public Administrations

The President of the Government of Spain, Pedro Sánchez, announced this today at business meeting "Innovation in the cloud as an opportunity for Spain", organised by Amazon Web Services.

This Strategy aims to prioritise the provisioning of services based on cloud technologies by Public Administrations, primarily using their own resources and complementing them with solutions from the private sector. It is an initiative that establishes synergies for better service delivery, and greater technological sovereignty.

The president highlighted data sovereignty as a key concept, related to technological autonomy, data protection and cybersecurity, areas in which the aforementioned Strategy will go further. As anticipated by the President of the Government of Spain, the Strategy will be deployed on the basis of three vectors.

• The adoption of a "hybrid cloud" infrastructure, consisting of the State Administration's own cloud, combined with those of other public administrations and external providers.
• The consolidation of the Data Processing Centres of the General State Administration into a smaller number of centres with better performance, reducing operating costs (economic and environmental) and maximising the agility of IT operations and boosting participation in initiatives within the framework of the European Union.
• A growing catalogue of services, with the incorporation of applications that respond to the common needs of Public Administrations with software as a service (SaaS) solutions.

Furthermore, in line with the European Data Strategy, large "data lakes", secure common data spaces, will be set up to help boost business innovation in the main strategic productive sectors, such as health, tourism, industry and commerce.

During his announcement, Pedro Sánchez emphasised the need for public sector efforts to be matched by the private sector in the context of digitalisation, given the scale of data management in our country. He stressed Spain's inclusive and cohesive vocation on a territorial level, as well as its defence of digital rights and technological humanism.

The president pointed out that, when looking at the cloud in its full potential, it is understood that it is much more than a concept installed in a virtual dimension, as it has a tangible and material anchorage and is valuable because it has a cross-cutting and multi-sectoral impact.

The announcement of the launch of this Public Administration Cloud Services Strategy responds to the need to change how public services are viewed in a way that contemplates greater flexibility, agility and adaptability, as demanded by society. Also the need to undertake innovations driven by the value of data, Artificial Intelligence, the Internet of Things or the new 5G/6G communications networks, as highlighted in the statement "Towards a new generation Cloud for Europe", which the 27 EU Member States signed on 15 October 2020.

Moving towards a digital public administration

The use of cloud services enables public administrations to provide digital services and secure, efficient and reliable technological infrastructures while requiring particular attention to safeguarding the necessary guarantees for the country's strategic autonomy, security and control over data.

In fact, the application of this cloud model projected to digital administration services has contributed to Spain's outstanding position in Europe as a whole, given that it provides tools to provide homogeneous services of equal quality, regardless of the size of the organisation, its resources or its geographical location.

The Public Administration Digitalisation Plan, which is key to achieving an intelligent administration that is closer to citizens in every procedure, is one of the main axes of the digital transformation roadmap followed by the Government of Spain: the Digital Spain Agenda 2026.

Driven by NextGenerationEU funds, investment in this area has increased twenty-fold since 2019, with an allocation of 3.165 billion euros over the next three years, of which at least 970 million euros will go to the regional governments and local authorities.

This country's commitment is already having positive results: in the latest SEDI 2022 report (Social and Economic Development Index, published by the European Commission), Spain ranks seventh in digitalisation and fifth in digital public services, ahead of the other major European economies.

Spain is a pioneering country in the integration of AI in the administration, as demonstrated by the programmes Kit Digital y My Citizen Folder, and ranks second in the European Union for open data in the public sector.