Today, as the use of digital technology by municipalities and government agencies picks up pace, there is a demand for creating a closer relationship between people and government by improving the quality and responsiveness of resident services. Graffer, which provides SaaS solutions to municipalities and government agencies from such a vantage point, has attracted attention as a startup that has injected some fresh air into the field of GovTech (a term coined by combining “Government” and “Technology”, referring to cooperation of government and private enterprises to increase the efficiency of government services by leveraging technology).

The “Graffer Platform” offered by this company uses digital technology to provide a framework that facilitates communication between people and government agencies. For example, when an event occurs that requires reporting to the regional government, such as relocation, birth or marriage, residents of the region go through the step of first finding out and understanding the procedures that need to be taken, then the step of preparing notification or application documents, and then finally the step of submitting the documents to the government office.

The Graffer Platform, which offers services providing comprehensive support for such a flow, is designed to allow regional residents to go through the procedures involved in each step in a comprehensive manner without confusion, using their own regular PC or smartphone, or via a reception counter at a government office. Specifically, the line-up includes “Graffer Procedure Guide”, which allows users to find out what procedures are required simply by answering questions via a smartphone or the Web, “Graffer Service Counter Reservations” for making reservations for counter service through a smartphone before heading to the government office, “Graffer Smart Applications”, which allows the user to complete various administrative procedures through a smartphone, and other services. This framework allows local governments to combine such services so as to improve convenience in a manner that is user-friendly for the residents, thus helping to strengthen the relationship between the local government and the people.

Graffer has settled on a policy of prioritizing the use of AWS in the future for the infrastructure used to provide the Graffer Platform. The company had previously used various cloud infrastructure services, but came to appreciate the active approach and impressive track record of AWS when it comes to enterprise systems for local government use.
According to Graffer, “Most of all, it was that AWS itself had invested a huge amount of resources focusing on the public sector, including local government, and had an extensive track record of adoption and case studies in this area. Our company also appreciated being able to fully satisfy all requirements in deploying public cloud services for the public sector.”

In the 3-layer segregation environment specific to local government systems, the use of a public cloud assumes connection to the Local Government Wide Area Network (LGWAN), which serves as a dedicated government network for connecting the internal networks of local public entities (internal agency LANs) to each other to enable secure and reliable exchange of electronic documents, electronic mail, information sharing and shared use of various business support systems. In addition to meeting the stringent security requirements of the LGWAN, a multifaceted approach for ensuring a high security level is required. AWS itself has plenty of security functions, and there is also a line-up of many products and services from its partners, and combining these made it possible to satisfy the stringent requirements.
“Also, the recent COVID-19 pandemic necessitated the startup of new services, such as vaccination applications, at a rapid pace, and it is important to have an infrastructure that would allow us to respond promptly to such needs. In terms of costs as well, the use of metered billing makes it possible to accommodate sudden increases in usage. This high flexibility and scalability of the infrastructure itself was a major advantage of AWS,” says Mr. Yosuke Hatakeyama, who serves as Product Manager at Graffer.

Graffer is currently pushing the implementation of the various services making up the Graffer Platform on AWS. By using the right tools for the job from among the variety of functions offered by AWS, Graffer has implemented a secure, scalable and cost-efficient service provision infrastructure.

The company has particularly valued the ability to perform individual management in a multi-account environment while consolidating the computer resources for the various services in Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) clusters. “This makes it possible to handle releases and updates of different services without spending a lot of time, thus reducing development costs, even when multiple services are being developed and interconnected and provided to end users, as our company is doing,” says Mr. Hatakeyama.

The series of services deployed on Graffer Platform started from providing services to a small number of local governments. The scale was then rapidly expanded, and as of February 2022, the platform has been adopted by 100 organizations and has grown to where it is being used by about 30 million residents. Being able to implement infrastructure with excellent flexibility and expandability through the use of AWS eliminated all concerns regarding scalability even in the face of rapid business development.

Whether or not the public sector is able to respond flexibly and quickly in the face of changes taking place in the world, including the occurrence of unexpected social events such as the COVID-19 pandemic as well as institutional changes, has come to be a matter that truly calls the “strength of the nation” into question. Given its conviction that system design requires a stance that seeks to combine micro-services as appropriate to the circumstances and needs rather than building the system monolithically on the basis of meticulous examination, Graffer views AWS as an optimal cloud infrastructure for implementing such an approach.

The company intends to continue offering new services and improving existing services on the basis of AWS in order to respond to the broad range of needs involved in digitalization of local governments. “For example, rather than building systems to meet individual needs, we want to look into a framework that would make it possible to abstract away government business and to implement processes and business logic conforming to the legal system and tasks, that may change over time, in a simple manner through the use of no-code tools,” says Mr. Hatakeyama.

With a view to the future, the company is also keeping an eye on the “AWS Startup Ramp” program developed by AWS. This program offers resources to enable startups aiming at business development in the public sector, with its reportedly high barrier to entry, to start using AWS quickly, including AWS free use credits, training, and access to support. Graffer, which joined this program early on, expects that through such activity on the part of AWS, more vendors will become involved in public sector oriented business, further promoting the digitalization of government agencies, which in turn will help to increase the “strength of the nation.”