2 THE LOCAL ICT LANDSCAPE HARNESSING NEW PARADIGMS The drive of the European Commission to accelerate interoperability, making systems and organisations work together, poses additional challenges and opportunities. It nurtures the concept of connected government through the alignment of departmental processes, standardisation, discovery and reuse of ICT assets and continuous rigour in improving the level of trust in the services provided by the public sector. Implementation of information systems within the public sector needs to incorporate the principles and recommendations of initiatives such as the European Interoperability Framework, European Interoperability Strategy and the semantic initiatives promoted through the European Commission’s Joinup platform13. National technological infrastructure is in a good shape and compares quite favourably at an international level (Table 1). Malta has an impressive proliferation of mobile telephony and Internet access. Similarly, there is high digital confidence by consumers. By 2012, the mobile penetration rate in Malta reached 132%, slightly higher than the EU average of 130%14. In 2012, 77% of households had access to the Internet – slightly higher than the EU27 average of 76%. In this regard, the main concerns are the dependence on other countries for Internet connection, the capacity of international connectivity, the affordability of broadband for users and the lack of local content for the web and mobile devices15. Indicator Malta Mobile Penetration Rate Households having access to Broadband Internet NGA lines as a % of total fixed broadband lines 132% 77% 47% EU Average 130% 72% 20% Malta Ranking 13th 7th 7th Table 1 The new enterprise ICT landscape of cloud services, mobility and BYOD, and social media usage, creates very different types of network traffic to the traditional mix of in-house client-server workloads. Architecture and networks need to evolve to keep pace. Not only is more bandwidth required to accommodate the workloads involved, but also time delay must be avoided. Lower latency, particularly over wide-area networks, is needed to ensure good response times for cloud-based applications and other services. JoinUp is the sharing and re-use interoperability solutions for public administrations platform (http://joinup.eu). European Commission (http://ec.europa.eu/digital-agenda/sites/digital-agenda/files/DAE%20SCOREBOARD%202013%20-%20SWD%202013%20217%20FINAL.pdf). 15. The term ‘mobile devices’ within the context of this document includes mobile phones, tablets, laptops, ultrabooks, etc. 13. 14. Source: 18