Update to the Guidelines of Technology Standards for Public Administration

On September 21, 2020, the National Office of Information Technology (the “ONTI” after its acronym in Spanish), under the President’s Chief of Staff Office, issued Provision 1/2020 (Provision) and updated the “Technology Standards for the Public Administration” (the “ETAP” after its acronym in Spanish) Version 24.0.                                                                                            

The ONTI’s main objective is the formulation of policies for the transformation and modernization of the Argentine Government and, through the ETAP, seeks to establish general standards for the promotion of quality and efficiency in the provision of Information and Communications Technologies services ( the “TIC” after its acronym in Spanish). The ETAP serves as a guide to be followed by the Argentine Government for the preparation of bidding terms and conditions for technological products and/or services.

The Provision only updated “Guideline 10 – laaS and PaaS” whose objective is the contracting of cloud services; meaning, the access to remote computing resources from a public cloud under the modalities of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS).

The update is a substantial change with respect to previous guidelines approved by Provision 5/2019 issued by the ONTI. The previous version reflected the technical specifications and requirements for contracting IaaS & PaaS services. This new version contains general considerations that government agencies must consider when drafting their own bidding terms and conditions for contracting cloud services. 

According to the recitals of the Provision, the change is motivated by the need to adjust the ETAP to the principles of promotion of competition between all interested parties and competition between bidders, granting government agencies the possibility of evaluating a broader number of cloud services providers in future tender procedures. More specifically, the reason for the change was to provide Government agencies enough elements to develop technical specifications and requirements, without excluding the “Empresa Argentina de Soluciones Satelitales S.A.” (the state-owned satellite solution company - ARSAT) from the possibility of fulfilling the current technological needs, as was the case under the previous ETAP version.

With this amendment the Argentine Government  intends to provide the possibility of technological sovereignty.