e-Residency is building a new digital nation for citizens of the world where no one is held back from their entrepreneurial potential because of where they live or where they choose to travel. This has enormous potential for unlocking global growth by democratising access to entrepreneurship and e-commerce.

We believe that countries will one day compete for e-residents based on the quality of their public e-services and their business environment. Several countries have already taken the first steps based on the best practices of Estonia’s e-Residency programme.

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Increased cybercrime and politically motivated attacks on electronic services mean cyber security is more important than ever for both the private and the public sector. Estonia’s preparedness to handle cyber crises has significantly increased over the past decade. The country has created intrusion detection and protection systems, practised cooperation with both public and private institutions, significantly contributed to the awareness of users, and is participating in intensive international cooperation.

After its experience with the 2007 cyber attacks, Estonia has implemented blockchain technology to ensure data and systems integrity and combat insider risk, and became one of the most recognized and valued cyber security experts internationally. Since then Estonia became the home of the NATO Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence (NATO CCD COE) and European IT agency. CCD COE is organizing the world’s largest and most complex international technical live-fire cyber defence exercise Locked Shields with 900 participants from 25 nations. International conference Cycon is attracting 600 key experts and decision makers of the global cyber defence community to Estonia every year.

NATO CCDCOE
Information System Authority
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The Data Embassy is an extension of the Estonian government in the cloud, which means the state owns server resources outside its territorial boundaries. This is an innovative concept for handling state information, as states usually store their information within their physical boundaries. Those resources are under Estonian state control and must be capable not only of providing data backups, but also of operating the most critical services.

This new approach makes it possible for the Estonian state to continue operating under conditions where its local data centres have been stopped or disturbed due to a natural disaster, large-scale cyber attack, power failure or other crisis situation.

The first data embassy will be set up with Luxembourg by the end of 2017.

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Estonia is already an innovation leader in IT with electronic identity cards, i-Voting and e-Residency. In 2017, we took another important step when the government made it legal to test self-driving vehicles on all national and local roads. We believe that the self-driving technology helps improve road safety and road use efficiency.

With self-driving cars, Estonia will continue its commitment to providing a state-of-the-art platform for innovation and new technologies, as it already has all the necessary prerequisites in place. The reality of seeing self-driven vehicles running on most of Estonia’s transport routes is just around the corner.

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The goal of the Reporting 3.0 project is to reduce the burden on entrepreneurs of the obligatory submission of data to state institutions. The first step in the project is the simplification of the entire salaries and labour expenses reporting process to make the submission of this data automatic. A new e-Tax and Customs Board portal will be completed in 2020, in which information exchange between companies and tax authority will be automatic and require only the granting of access to the necessary data. This will save valuable time and money, so companies can focus on growth and people can work more productively.

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As businesses and citizens become more mobile, the need for truly international e-services becomes all the more pressing in order to remove the red tape involved in the cross-border movement of people and companies.

Imagine a Swedish ER doctor being able to instantly access the medical records of a patient from Hungary, or an Italian company digitally signing a contract with a counterpart in the UK.

Estonia has already started practical work in this direction. A public sector data exchange facility between Finland and Estonia was created in 2017. Estonia, as the leader in this sphere, hopes that cross-border data exchange will soon become possible between all European countries.

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Healthcare 4.0 is Estonia’s future solution. Here are some keywords that illustrate what the future may look like.

First of all, empowerment: people will become more aware of those factors influencing their health and each person can progressively become more responsible for managing their own health.

Second, mobility: patients will be able to access information wherever they happen to be, at a time of their choosing. In the future, Estonia will provide point-of-care devices – equipment that patients can use themselves.

Finally, Estonia will provide global health accounts and introduce the benefits of health procedures based on artificial intelligence.

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We in Estonia believe that raising smarter kids is the smartest investment a country can make. But we also understand the importance of lifelong learning. The educational digital revolution in Estonia aims to implement modern digital technology more efficiently and effectively in learning and teaching, to improve the digital skills of the entire nation. One example of the digital transformation in the education system is that by 2020 all study materials in Estonia will be digitized and available through an online e-schoolbag.

The Real Time Economy (RTE) is an environment where financial and administrative transactions connecting citizens, business and public sector entities are in structured standardized digital form and increasingly generated automatically and completed in real time without store and forward processes.

Digital services should be designed so that they are easy to use and secure for the EU-citizen (also for handicapped and those who do not use Internet) and provide incentives for migration from paper, email and manual versions and connect data from all needed sources. For example solutions like real time payments, e-ID services, real time e-Invoicing and e-Receipts, automated and real time accounting and VAT-reporting, automated credit and investment risk evaluation and processing, can hugely benefit digital single market by directly saving the costs.

Introduction of Industry 4.0-type solutions could impact everything from how quality is monitored to how much effort goes into supply chain management. Several players in Estonia’s ICT sector focus on Industry 4.0 solutions development.

At the center of their strategy is a concept called Real Time Factory which, as the name suggests, allows managers to track key performance indicators in real time, showing where improvements can be made and allowing the entire factory to operate as one integrated system. Tallinn-based SimFactory, for example, specializes in helping electronics manufacturers adopt the Real Time Factory approach, giving them the kind of data-driven production that can streamline every aspect of their operations.