Colombian agency moves 1.64 million property records to Oracle Cloud

For the Department of Antioquia, the cadastre—a registry of land parcels and their boundaries—plays more than its usual economic role in supporting taxation and transactions. In Colombia, the registry helps in fulfilling one of the main points of the Peace Agreement signed in 2016 by the Colombian government: providing reparations to the victims of a time marked by violence in the country, through the return of land expropriated by criminal groups.

The Department of Antioquia lies in northwest Colombia and includes 125 municipalities and more than 60,000 square kilometers. The Antioquia Cadastre is responsible for managing survey and map information on physical, legal, and economic real estate inventories for all those municipalities in the region. Municipalities rely on this data to collect property taxes.

But the land registry management agency was running this critical data asset of land, boundaries, and buildings using an on-premises physical server environment that was experiencing frequent technical failures. During the end-of-the-year spike in usage, for example, several members had to monitor the system around-the-clock, right through New Year’s Eve, to keep it running. “I’d to be on December 28, 29, 30, and 31, all the time, and leave at 6 in the morning because the machine was too slow,” says Nancy Dávila, a specialized Cadastre Management professional.

The leadership knew they needed to change the infrastructure in order to manage consolidated cadastral information for 122 municipalities, totaling about 1.6 million properties.

The department migrated the platform to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) for improved reliability, speed, and automation that the on-premises system lacked. “A good database with cadastral information is key on the next scale for nation’s territorial planning, for both the department and municipalities. Today I can guarantee that Catastro Antioquia’s management is the entity with the most developed technology in the nation,” says José Giraldo Pineda, Land Registry Manager for Antioquia.

OCI made the cadastral system much more reliable, which meant that IT teams no longer had to work overnight shifts in order to keep the system running. The system can now process an information request for about 3,000 property tax units without impacting the processing performance of other users.

With Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, Antioquia Cadastre Management employees can focus their time on more strategic activities.

“When we switched to the Oracle Cloud, we managed to do everything in less time, we didn’t have to work overnight or take shifts to supervise the cadastral processes, and our response to the citizens improved, as we managed to expedite the procedures for different requests and services,” Dávila says.