UGPP provides more agile services to citizens with the support of Google Cloud

The Social Security Management Unit (UGPP), founded in 2010 and controlled by the Colombian Ministry of Finance and Public Credit, has a twofold mission: recognizing the pension rights of former public employees and ensuring social security contributions are paid correctly and on time across Colombia.

This public agency has over 850 employees that carry out their activities based on a reliable IT platform, applying basic IT management processes and principles.

Within a context of non-stop technological transformation, the office updates its business architecture continuously to coordinate business and IT areas and strengthen operations at UGPP.

Towards better operational and data management

UGPP faced the challenge of digitizing its procedures and automating processes to provide citizens with better services and to simplify data access. This involved improving not only the coordination between its departments, but also the agency's project management capabilities so that internal teams could develop their IT capabilities.

That is why the institution adopted emerging technologies, such as data analytics, big data, and artificial intelligence, including a robust metrics methodology to leverage the information already available in its data lake, based on better data monitoring and analysis practices.

Pursuing its goal to optimize management, which was key to gain more timely and reliable insights, UGPP needed to increase its data analytics capacity and ensure data was delivered and shared both quickly and efficiently, without neglecting at any time its digital security.

A cloud to improve data access and availability

Migrating UGPP's apps and services to Google Cloud to address these challenges – a process that lasted approximately one year – helped the organization unlock solutions that were key to make a more efficient use of computing resources.

After the initial deployment of Google Workspace's email, meeting, and chat applications, aimed at improving communication and collaboration between UGPP employees, the entity adopted Google Analytics to meet new data management and analysis requirements.

It also implemented Google Cloud's BigQuery and Dataflow as part of the main aim of migrating data sources that had previously been loaded on-premises to a cloud-based environment.

These solutions, along with others, such as Artifact Registry and Container Registry, provided the agency with the necessary data ingestion, extraction, and delivery to streamline and consolidate access to these sources, by both UGPP and the citizens.

Additionally, UGPP rolled out Google Kubernetes Engine to develop container-based legacy applications and optimize infrastructure management, and Cloud Build's CI/CD platform to streamline lifecycles, from code loading to Cloud Source Repositories through app testing in several environments.

A more efficient environment for employees and citizens

Streamlining UGPP's data processes was one of the many advantages of adopting Google Cloud solutions.

Loading data and files to various sources, which would previously have taken up to 72 hours, now takes just a few minutes in the cloud. By eliminating the need for an on-premises infrastructure, UGPP can now scale on-demand, which significantly reduces costs and improves response times.

Management has also been enhanced: previously manual tasks, such as monitoring data or rolling out releases, have been automated with no impact on production.

By internally enhancing its processes and management, UGPP has boosted the productivity of its employees, who have now embraced the use of these tools to save time and process data more efficiently with more stable deployments.

Colombian citizens have also benefited enormously from these changes. Before, they needed to file applications to UGPP in order to request data on their social security contributions, which would take days to process.

Today, they have an all-new tool at their disposal to file requests digitally, receive relevant information in just a few minutes, and learn exactly which UGPP areas work on each case, thus avoiding unnecessary third-party involvement in this process and saving time.

IT security at UGPP has also improved with Google Cloud: the agency has managed to meet its availability and security requirements through a 99.7% SLA.

The cloud has also helped mitigate costs related to the agency's traditional data loss protection (DLP) system, by means of a fully managed service that makes it easier to identify, classify, and protect sensitive information.

Support to move forward

Throughout the cloud migration process, UGPP was continuously supported by Google Cloud's team, in terms of engineer training and architecture design.

Today, UGPP is planning to continue working along the same lines, as well as to extend its use of cloud tools to other internal teams and adopt AI technologies, such as Vertex AI, to take its platform to a new level.

The goal? To grow non-stop by providing increasingly agile and efficient services to meet citizens' expectations.