The 14th National Party Congress has set development goals: striving for average annual GDP growth of 10 per cent or higher during the 2026-2030 period; raising GDP per capita to approximately $8,500 by 2030; and increasing the digital economy’s share to around 30 per cent of GDP. These targets aim to transform Vietnam into a developing nation with a modern industrial base and upper-middle income by 2030, and ultimately into a developed, high-income nation by 2045.
Crucially, the Congress affirmed the necessity of establishing a new growth model driven primarily by science, technology, innovation, and digital transformation. Mr. Nguyen Hong Hien, Director of the Department of Science and Technology at the Central Commission for Policy and Strategy, told participants at the “Digital Transformation in the Public Sector: Building Sustainable Infrastructure and Ensuring Data Security for National Growth” workshop on August 24 that digital transformation in the public sector is not only the digitization of existing processes; it is fundamentally about innovating national governance, enhancing management effectiveness and efficiency, and reducing compliance costs for citizens and businesses, thereby directly expanding the scope for growth.
Mandatory requirement
Starting from July 1, 2025, a two-tier local government model officially came into operation, with 34 cities and provinces around Vietnam, eliminating the district level and concentrating authority at the provincial and commune levels. This is not merely a matter of removing an administrative tier; the broader objective is to bring the government closer to the people and improve service delivery.
To achieve this, the Party Central Committee has determined that the transformation model must be integrated with the application of science and technology, innovation, and digital transformation. Success is impossible without effectively applying these elements to the new model. “A direct consequence is that the digital government must now operate seamlessly across three administrative levels, including the central, provincial, and commune levels, with the commune level directly providing the majority of public services to citizens,” Mr. Hien said.
He added that a one-year review indicated that the model is generally operating stably, but practical experience has revealed that its effectiveness depends primarily on the quality of commune-level government, the caliber of the workforce, and data-driven governance capabilities.
Alongside these organizational shifts, fundamental institutional strides forward are being made. The Law on Digital Transformation, comprising eight chapters and 48 articles, serves as the first framework legislation to comprehensively regulate digital transformation activities across State agencies, organizations, enterprises, and the general public. A key requirement is that digital systems must ensure consistency, synchronization, and interoperability, enabling data connectivity and sharing while complying with the National Digital Architecture Framework and the National Data Governance and Management Framework.
Building upon this legal foundation, the National Strategy on Digital Transformation clearly defines a development philosophy that places citizens and businesses at the center as both the primary agents and the main beneficiaries. The Strategy sets ambitious targets for 2030, such as digitizing all administrative procedure records and outcomes, adopting unified national shared digital platforms, and standardizing and interconnecting shared databases to enable their utilization by AI. By 2045, the goal is to position Vietnam among the world’s Top 30 nations in digital government, with a digital economy accounting for at least 50 per cent of GDP.
Notably, the Central Steering Committee for the implementation of Politburo Resolution No. 57 has issued decisive directives, mandating that the development of foundational infrastructure be treated as a long-term national strategic task.
Data bottleneck
Despite a solid foundation in terms of legal frameworks and policies, reality shows that data remains fragmented, inconsistent in quality, and lacking a high level of interoperability across systems. Furthermore, the process of reorganizing administrative units has generated a vast volume of data requiring adjustment, standardization, and updating.
According to Mr. Vu Duy Hien, Deputy Secretary General and Chief of Office at the National Cybersecurity Association, current realities are imposing new demands on how data is organized and utilized within the public sector, particularly amid the restructuring of organizational frameworks, administrative boundaries, and management systems.
When organizational structures change, data must be reorganized as well. This is not merely a technical matter. It encompasses data standardization, connectivity, the delineation of responsibilities, access control, and ensuring security during data sharing and utilization. “We must aim for a system where data is interconnected yet controlled, shared yet protected, and utilized to generate value without creating new risks,” Mr. Duy Hien said.
Concurrently, the rapid advancement of AI is opening up new avenues for development, but can only deliver value when built upon a foundation of high-quality data, robust infrastructure, and a trustworthy digital environment. “Therefore, the issue of data today is fundamentally a matter of governance capacity, technological mastery, and digital sovereignty in this new phase of development,” he added.
He also noted that it can be considered both the core and the bottleneck of the entire process. Data remains fragmented and lacks interoperability across various locations, he continued, with inconsistent quality and slow connectivity to national databases in some areas.
Mr. Pham Trung Thanh, an expert at the National Cybersecurity Association, warned that the transition from physical infrastructure to cloud environments is forcing many agencies to operate legacy and new systems simultaneously, creating complex architectures while dedicated information security personnel remain limited. “The risk does not only arise when a system is attacked,” Mr. Thanh explained. “Hackers can remain hidden inside a system for months, seeking to escalate their privileges before launching an attack. By then, data may have been stolen or encrypted, while systems providing services to citizens could face disruption.”
Priorities needed
Ms. Vo Thi Trung Trinh, Director of the Ho Chi Minh City Digital Transformation Center, said that since March 2025, the southern city’s Digital Transformation Center has served as a technical hub, implementing a synchronized digital infrastructure and building a unified architecture to avoid the formation of “data islands.”
As a result, to date, 100 per cent of the city’s critical information systems are operating on a highly secure cloud computing platform. The data center maintains 1,286 virtual servers, providing storage and processing capacity for the city’s shared platforms. In terms of connectivity, the Metronet network connects over 600 points to the data center, and a dedicated multi-point management and control system is seamlessly connected to 168 wards or communes and over 500 agencies.
In the time ahead, Ho Chi Minh City aims to complete basic criteria such as realizing the “one-time declaration” model, testing an AI platform (virtual assistant, and meeting recording analysis), building a data exchange for the city to facilitate transparent data transactions, and training data analysis and AI skills for city officials and employees.
Mr. Hien added that Ho Chi Minh City’s experience demonstrates that the journey from data digitization and interoperability to genuine data-driven urban governance is far from straightforward. “Key questions arise regarding the decisive conditions, spanning data governance frameworks, organizational structures, technical platforms, and human resources, as well as the practical challenges inherent in operating under a two-tier administrative model, and the identification of a model that can be standardized and replicated in other localities, including those with limited resources,” he said.
Ms. Jola Le, Vietnam Country Manager at Synology, said data protection should be viewed as an ecosystem encompassing data storage, management, backup, recovery, access control, and security monitoring. One of the solutions is “air-gapping”, which enables backup systems to be isolated from the network when they are not required or when abnormal activity is detected, providing an additional layer of protection against the risk of data being encrypted or destroyed. “In the process of building digital government and data-driven governance, security cannot be an additional layer added at the end,” she said. “It must be embedded from the design stage of infrastructure, system architecture, and data organization. This is also a critical condition for sustainable public sector digital transformation, ensuring the continuity of government operations and essential services for citizens and businesses.”
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