No more use of private emails for public business – Ursula

Minister for Communication and Digitalisation, Ursula Owusu-Ekuful, has announced that from 2023, public sector workers will be barred from using private emails for official work.

She said the official platform for public sector workers will be overseen by the National Information Technology Agency.

Speaking at the technology Breakfast meeting organized to sensitize Public Chief Executives on leveraging on government’s digitalization drive, she urged government agencies to liaise with the agency to make sure they are placed on the platform.

She charged the public sector CEOs to tighten structures to protect government information in the discharge of duties and noted that the goal is to ensure “that official information stays within the official domain.”

“In other countries, you could lose your job for not using your official email because it compromises the security of the entire system. It destroys institutional memory. It makes government information available everywhere in the world.”

Mrs. Owusu-Ekuful’s statement came against the backdrop of concerns that public officials were using personal emails for official communication.

The minister said such a tendency exposed the state to numerous risks of cyber attacks and compromised official data.

“Somebody somewhere is using that information that has been provided on those supposedly free platforms and doing all kinds of things with our data which we don’t know about.”

She said this policy will ensure the continuity of state information and mitigate instances of exposing state information to cyberattacks.