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[Notis Mitarachi. Minister of Migration
and Asylum of Hellenic Republic]
The Ministry of Migration and Asylum of Greece,
established in January 2020, handles both legal migration,
those who come to Greece to live,
work and invest, as well as asylum seekers.
Our goal was a holistic modern approach to
public work seeking the maximum in cyber security
and cooperation between services throughout
Greece and European partners.
Moving a ministry to the cloud is a challenge
in terms of security, resiliency and data protection.
[Anastasios Salis. Director General for ICT ]
Setting up the communication
and collaboration infrastructure on premises
is a very difficult task to perform in the public sector.
After considering different platforms, we
decided to go for a trial using Microsoft 365.
[Notis Mitarachi] Our cooperation with Microsoft
coincided with the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic.
A fact that provided us with the necessary
tools to continue our work
within this newly saved environment of social distancing.
At that time our workforce was still not
familiarized with working from distance
but the ease of use of application like Teams
allowed a swift and painless transformation
of working practices within the Ministry.
[Anastasios Salis] Using Microsoft Teams
we managed to practically eliminate the distances,
because we could have even the Minister popping up
inside the meeting, talking to us, giving his guidelines.
We can have the management and the high level
management collaborate with employees.
[Notis Mitarachi]
The various Microsoft applications enabled us
to rapidly clear and organize our employees` data
in accounts, systimatize the way we register new flows.
In addition we were able to provide them a unified environment
for accessing email and cloud storage services,
as well as access to critical software
like Word, Excel and PowerPoint.
With this initiative the Ministry is pioneering
efficient improvement through cloud technologies.
And this proves that the public sector can benefit from the same
modern working practices as any private business.
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