COUNTRY FOCUS: OMAN
It provides the same cloud services and user experience as Oracle’ s public cloud regions, but it is self-contained, independent, and separate from other public cloud regions.
This meticulous multistep process took less than a minute to complete, after which a list of candidates appeared, and voters were then able to conveniently cast their ballots using the mobile application.
The implementation, which was led by ITHCA, formerly Oman Information and Communications Technology Group together with Oracle, helps the Sultanate run its entire IT estate on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, OCI with physical control of infrastructure and data to help adhere to regulatory, data residency, and latency requirements.
Conducting the Arab world’ s first digital election in the Sultanate showed that OCI Dedicated Region can support government workloads.
Traditionally, election day had required a workforce of 7,000 deployed across 61 cities. The new voting process required far fewer election workers, and the advanced electronic voting system ran successfully without issues.
During the Majlish A ' Shura Council Shura elections held in 2023, the Oman government enhanced the election application to show real-time election results in multiple languages to Omani citizens. To aid voters in casting their ballots, the number of voters during the upcoming hour was forecast using a pretrained Machine Learning, ML model.
This collected data from the voting database and generated statistics using OCI AI infrastructure within the OCI Dedicated Region to preserve digital sovereignty and security.
This cloud-first approach allows the Sultanate to modernise legacy applications, boost innovation, and implement additional physical security controls to protect sensitive workloads and data.
ITHCA Group, formerly known as Oman Information and Communication Technologies Group was established in 2019 by Oman Investment Authority to develop the information technology sector, support development of emerging technologies through strategic investments, boost digital infrastructure required including cloud services, and promote digital transformation in the Sultanate of Oman.
Soon after its inception, ITHCA Group integrated companies like Oman Broadband, Oman Technology Fund, Oman Towers and Space Communications Technology under its umbrella.
In 2022, Oman made history when the Ministry of Interior moved the national voting system to OCI Dedicated Region. The ITHCA Group and the Ministry of Interior, MOI partnered with Oracle to successfully deploy the voting platform in a span of three months, including the deployment of a database and. NET application to OCI Kubernetes Engine, OKE.
The Municipal Council elections were held over 12 hours in December 2022. They ran entirely through a mobile application that connected to systems running on Dedicated Region. Over that 12-hour period, 288,469 Omani voters verified their identity using a biometric digital ID platform.
The forecasted statistics were streamed to voters using an in-app AI-based avatar, bringing a new dimension to how vital election information was presented to the public. The fully enabled digital elections provided Omani citizens with transparency into the electoral process and visibility into the immediate results. The process was also much more convenient for voters, with over 750,000 citizens casting ballots.
Conducting the Arab world’ s first fully digital election set a standard for innovation in the Sultanate and showed that OCI Dedicated Region can support sensitive government workloads.
Since then, many government and semi-government entities, including Oman Airports, Oman Water Services Company, and Oman Liquified Natural Gas, LNG, migrated key applications, including Oracle E-Business Suite, to Oman’ s OCI Dedicated Region.
To support demand and provide resilience, ITHCA Group deployed a second OCI Dedicated Region in Oman. This provides government organisations additional capacity and a more resilient architecture to help protect sensitive workloads and data, with disaster recovery capabilities located entirely within the borders of the country.
Soon after its inception, ITHCA Group integrated companies like Oman Broadband, Oman Technology Fund, Oman Towers and Space Communications Technology under its umbrella. p
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