Cloud Dialogue meeting organized by AmCham and U.S. Embassy Foreign Commercial Service

AmCham Poland has elevated the dialogue between the public and private sectors on IT security and cloud technology to the next level by bringing together the Polish government plenipotentiary for cyber security, the US Ambassador to Poland, and representatives of leading American tech companies Amazon Web Services, Google, IBM, and Microsoft to a meeting entitled “Cloud Dialogue”, held at the Warsaw Marriott, on March 22. 

In his opening remarks, Janusz Cieszyński, Secretary of State, Government Plenipotentiary for Cyber Security at Chancellery of the Prime Minister of Poland, said that Poland had attracted many companies specializing in cloud technology. They assumed that the public sector would resort to their services to optimize its operations but it did not materialize. The most significant demand for cloud services in Poland came from the private sector. But as new and better technologies are now available, the central government is one step away from starting the migration to the cloud. This process will be preceded by a local government transition to the cloud, based on tender provisions which are currently under preparation by the government. The minister said that this tender will be the largest one in the history of the Polish government. 

Mark Brzezinski, US Ambassador to Poland, said that cloud-based solutions could provide efficiency, stability, cost savings and built-in data redundancy. The US government knows it firsthand. Many of its public institutions have moved to the cloud over the last several years. For instance, the Department of State—a large organization with over 70,000 employees—now operates through a multi-cloud system across 300 offices in the US and overseas. 

The ambassador said that the private and public sectors in Poland can work closely to develop new opportunities for cloud-based solutions. He added that this kind of change requires a holistic approach that is secure and reliable.

The speeches were followed by a roundtable discussion with panelists representing the public and private sectors: Maciej Górski, Director of the Systems Management Department at the Chancellery of the Prime Minister; Krzysztof Szubert, Vice President of the Management Board and Chief Information Officer at PKO TFI; Member of the United Nations IGF High-Level Leadership. The private sector was represented by Magdalena Dziewguć, Cloud Poland Country Director, Google; Michał Jaworski, National Technology Officer, Microsoft; Marcin Klabiński, Cloud Leader at IBM; and Tomasz Olejnik, General Manager Public Sector for Central and Eastern Europe at Amazon Web Services.

The discussion was moderated by Jolanta Jaworska, Vice-President for Advocacy, Public Affairs and Regulatory at IBM Poland and the Baltic States. 

The panelists discussed how to build trust in the use of cloud technologies vs such risk factors as pandemics, wars, and financial crises; the government’s strategy to use cloud solutions and the potential of the IT sector in Poland; the advantages of cloud solutions for the economy, public institutions, companies, the innovation sector and startups; the security of the cloud infrastructure and the data in the cloud; the barriers to the adoption of cloud solutions by the public sector, and recommendations for the effective use of cloud solutions in a risk-based approach based on industry best practices and research that considers the differences between cyber threats, data sensitivity, and specific use cases.