ISLAMABAD: The Ministry of IT and Telecom has written a letter to all federal secretaries, asking them to shift websites of their respective ministries and attached departments to the main data centre of the National Telecommunication Corporation (NTC) to protect their data and websites from possible cyber attacks.

The IT ministry has also asked the government departments to shift to and use all official emails at ‘gov.pk’.

The letter said that official websites on private domains were exposed to cyber attacks which might result in loss and leakage of sensitive and important data.

The letter was written on the instruction of Federal Minister for IT Syed Amin ul Haq on Thursday who presided over a meeting to review progress on the e-office project of the federal government being executed by the National Information Technology Board (NITB).

The NITB has developed the e-office app to help government departments go paperless.

The e-office concept is aimed at improving internal efficiency in all government departments through electronic administration.

At present, 16 ministries and divisions have attained the level 4 of e-office which meants they are doing their work in completely paperless environment. The project continues in about 40 ministries and divisions and 107 departments of the federal government.

A senior official of the ministry concerned said that all departments were likely to reach the level 4 e-office by the end of 2021 as Covid-19 lockdowns had sped up the process and highlighted importance of digitisation of all government departments.

The e-office concept is a global trend as physical movement of files and documents consumes a lot of time and it requires continuous monitoring of these files and documents from desk to desk before their reaching the senior officials for a final decision on them.

Under the e-office programme, the NITB has trained 14,300 government employees and around Rs300 million has been saved annually in stationary budget while up to 80 per cent saving of operating time has been noted in the departments that have completely become computerised.

Published in Dawn, February 19th, 2021