Oman makes history by conducting digital elections using OCI Dedicated Region

The Government of the Sultanate of Oman launched a national initiative to move more than 120 government and semi-government entities to an integrated government cloud platform. Oman’s Vision 2040 framework set a long-term development plan for a cloud-first, centralized infrastructure that would help the government to speed innovation securely and enhance national technical capabilities. This initiative specified the highest levels of security to help meet the most demanding data sovereignty requirements, including physical control of infrastructure and data and isolation of customer data. In addition, all operations and access had to remain in the government’s data centers.

After extensive evaluation, the Government of the Sultanate of Oman selected OCI Dedicated Region as its sovereign cloud solution, bringing a complete set of OCI cloud services to its sensitive workloads. This sovereign cloud platform is a complete cloud region within Oman’s borders, operated and supported by Oracle. 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. The implementation, which was led by ITHCA (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. This cloud-first approach allows the Sultanate to modernize legacy applications, boost innovation, and implement additional physical security controls to protect sensitive workloads and data.

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 Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Kubernetes Engine.

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. 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. 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, which collected data from the voting database and generated statistics using OCI AI infrastructure within the OCI Dedicated Region to preserve digital sovereignty and security. 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 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. In the time since, 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 the OCI Dedicated Region.

To support demand and provide resilience, ITHCA Group deployed a second OCI Dedicated Region in Oman. This provides government organizations 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.