Serpro, the largest federal technology company, appears to have made a shift in its strategy in recent years, leaving behind the agreements reached with cloud giants such as AWS and Microsoft and returning to centralize its offer to the government in its own data centers.
At least, that’s what emerges from a statement from the state-owned company promoting the “Government Cloud”, a solution that, according to Serpro, transforms Brazil “into the only nation with a 100% sovereign cloud in the southern hemisphere”.
“The data will be in an environment 100% controlled by Serpro, in the São Paulo and Brasília environments”, says Serpro’s CEO, Alexandre Amorim.
The note released by Serpro also adds that the data will be kept “entirely within the country’s borders”, in the state-owned company’s data centers, which eliminates “risks associated with international data transfer” and ensures “full compliance with national regulations”.
Serpro’s text does not directly mention large cloud players such as AWS and Microsoft, but it is, in practice, a farewell to companies that have been gaining ground in the government since 2018, including through partnerships with Serpro itself.
Starting in 2019, Serpro began to close serial agreements with cloud giants, in which it positioned itself as an intermediary in the sale of cloud to government bodies.
AWS was the first to enter, with a contract worth R$71.2 million in 2019. Then came Huawei (R$23 million), Microsoft (R$22.6 million), Oracle (R$41.5 million ) and IBM (R$40.3 million).
The conditions are always the same: five-year contracts, in which the agreed values are just a base, the implementation of which will depend on how much Serpro will actually sell in the end.
It is not really known how many contracts were closed through this modality. Still at the end of the Bolsonaro government’s lights out, it became public that the Ministry of Health signed a R$32 million contract with Serpro acting as a “broker”.
The clues that a change of direction was on the way in Brasília came during the period of government change, at the end of 2022.
That was when César Alvarez, one of the members of the Lula government transition, said that the adoption of cloud in the government in the current way was “irresponsible”, to be corrected with a movement to “return to a data center policy”.
At the time, the Baguete report questioned AWS, by far the government’s largest cloud provider, with giant contracts awarded in recent years through the Ministry of Planning.
