Investments in digital transformation conducted by Romania are making their presence felt as progress on the public services component, and in the DESI ranking the country witnessed an improvement of over 20%, in the 2024 report for 2024, chairman of the Authority for the Digital Transformation of Romania (ADR), Dragos Cristian Vlad, said on Wednesday.

'We come up with positive news that Romania has significant growth compared with all the other member states and because we had to recover from it in terms of the digital transformation process. As you well know, as far as the DESI Digital Economy and Society Index measurement mechanism - a European indicator for measuring the digitalisation and the impact of digitalisation in our lives, both at the level of individuals, civil society, public services, and SMEs - was concerned, we were doing very well in terms of connectivity, speed and availability of the internet in our hands, but we had a lot to recover in terms of public services, e-public services and, last but not least, at the level of SMEs. (...) In 2025, for the 2024 measurement, I have some growth figures that show that investments in the digital transformation process are being felt as progress. On the public services component, we have an increase of over 20%, against a European Union average of 3.6%. So, we are basically back in the middle of the ranking or above the European average. At the level of online provision of essential cross-border public services between states, we have an increase of 45%, as against 4.3%, as a result of strategic measures and projects for Romania in the digital transformation process', Vlad told a conference on digitalisation and cybersecurity.

According to Vlad, Romania has to bridge the existing gap on the digital skills component.

'We are a continent that has perhaps regulated excessively, but today we can reap the fruits of these regulations and rules that will give us the power to grow economically and socially in the digitalisation sector in terms of cybersecurity. In 2022-2023, an entity was set up at ADR called the National Cybersecurity Network, where we have promoted and asked that each project, each financial allocation should have a minimum of 10% of the investment intended for the cyber protection of the information system of data to be managed, administered in future digitalisation investments. Last but not least, without false modesty, the government Cloud project is a successful project, a good example at European level, because it meets all the conditions of resilience, scalability and most of all data sovereignty. We all have to catch up - from all public administration actors up to and including companies that promote solutions - not only to have equipment, but also to have a culture and use the security component in the online life that we all have. We have to grow on digital skills, which is, from my point of view, the northern point of a digitalisation compass. Digital skills are essential for all of us, precisely to trust what we download, what we use and to confirm that life online is also safe.'

Romania's cybersecurity agenda, ways of detecting and countering cyber-attacks and trends in technology and in the digital market, are some of the subjects discussed on Wednesday at a conference on digitalisation and cybersecurity organised by Bursa publication. AGERPRES (RO - editing by: Daniel Badea; EN - writing by: Corneliu-Aurelian Colceriu)