"Korea is the world's first in implementing digital government security system based on Artificial Intelligence (AI)."

Dr. Kang, Dong-seok, the President of NIRS assured in an interview on March 4th. 2021, AI-based cyber security does not only defend the systems against attacks, but also monitors security abnormalities through AI self-learning, predicts attacks in advance, and blocks them automatically.

"The system went into effect this year. As the world's first case of applying AI to the entire security management system, we have received many inquiries from home and abroad."

After receiving a doctorate in Computer Science from University, President Kang worked at Daewoo Telecommunication Research Institute and National Information Society Agency for more than 30 years before taking office as the President of NIRS in March last year.

He said, "NIRS is the world's first data center exclusively for the government use," and "It started as a government integrated computing center established in Daejeon in 2005 for security and data management to support digital government." NIRS has been responsible for operating systems and managing security for central administrative government agencies.

Many people think that websites, systems, and public applications of Korean government are inconvenient and insecure. The infamous ActiveX was the number one contributor to reinforcing this perception.

Dr. Kang said, "Whenever I talk to foreign government officials, Korean cyber security defense system is recognized as the world's highest level." However, he said it is also true that problems still exist in areas that people come into contact with, such as homepages and public applications.

President Kang has been particularly emphasizing the goal of becoming an 'Intelligent cloud service specialist' ever since taking office. He said that migrating government data to a cloud-based system enables stable operation and is advantageous for sharing and utilizing vast amount of data. "The goal is to migrate all systems of public institutions to cloud-based by 2025."

He explained that, considering the security level, important systems are directly to be managed by the government in the cloud center, and those systems that government does not have to directly manage cloud be sent to private clouds and open them to the public.

(Seoul Press, March 5th, 2021)