Directorate General of Taxes of Indonesia Ensures Reliability and Safety of Applications with F5

Directorate General of Taxes (DGT), a government body under the Ministry of Finance of Indonesia, is responsible for developing taxation-related policies. As one of the country’s main economy drivers, DGT is expected to be ahead of the curve in capturing future opportunities in the ever-growing digital era.

To meet high customer expectations, DGT used F5 solutions to transform its IT infrastructures, platforms, and systems—helping to drive business while providing better e-services to all taxpayers throughout the country.

Business Challenges

Providing a quality customer experience and maintaining a high level of service to different audiences, geographies, and infrastructures across Indonesia are the biggest challenges for DGT. The constitution, which manages all the data and information of all the taxpayers in Indonesia, is tasked to ensure application reliability and security as one of their key opinion to a successful digital transformation.

Furthermore, the growing demand for electronic services from younger generations creates extra pressure for the organization to evolve its processes.

These circumstances have led DGT to rely more on e-services to effectively reach its audience while accommodating the need for a digital transformation. Developing and implementing e-services creates a high dependency on reliable, safe, and secure applications across different infrastructures and platforms.

Solution

DGT has worked with F5 since 2014 to improve existing solutions. By deploying F5 products, the organization can now maximize the utilization of e-core appliances for more optimized and secure applications.

DGT has enhanced the scalability of its IT infrastructure with F5 BIG-IP Application Security Manager (ASM) and BIG-IP Application Acceleration Manager (AAM). BIG-IP ASM provides DGT with extra layers of protection for applications—including request validation, bot detection, and DDoS protection. BIG-IP AAM enables DGT to optimize web app performance and minimize server utilization by leveraging reverse proxy caching capabilities. The upgrades aim to future-proof DGT’s infrastructure and enable the organization to meet the growing needs of its customers.

Benefits

To ensure a successful digital transformation, DGT is leveraging F5 technology to improve the reliability and security of all its applications. These upgrades will allow greater capacity in the coming years, and align with the tremendous growth of IT and applications.

• Ensures greater application availability

DGT faces a massive challenge in ensuring application availability for all stakeholders across Indonesia. With F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM), the organization can optimize its systems and guarantee availability for an immense number of users. BIG-IP LTM carries out a critical task of load balancing the traffic to application servers while managing incoming connections. As a result, DGT can ensure infrastructure availability up to 99 percent of the time and enable the whole IT system to perform beyond expectations, providing a more seamless digital journey for taxpayers.

• Increases application speed and reliability

As applications play a significant role in digitalization efforts, performance has been one of the key areas that the organization is focusing on. DGT aims to provide a seamless experience for its users, by optimizing its web application performance and minimizing server utilization using reverse proxy caching with BIG-IP AAM. The solution speeds up application performance, making them run three times faster.

High-performing systems also enable the organization to demonstrate its capabilities in providing reliable e-services for users. This effort boosts taxpayers’ confidence levels in jumping onto digital services, thus helping DGT to achieve success from its IT initiatives.

• Provides a scalable and agile IT infrastructure

As the government body that manages taxes in the country, having the ability to adapt is crucial. The central government expects DGT to always be ahead of the curve in order to capture growing opportunities. Future-proofing the infrastructure enables DGT to adapt to the digital era’s rapid progression. Beyond having the best and latest technology, future-proofing means consolidating technology to create a highly scalable and agile infrastructure.

DGT is achieving agility and scalability by consolidating load balancing, security, and acceleration. With F5, DGT has improved its infrastructure, lowered CapEx and OpEx, and is better able to adapt and grow.

• Protects against network and application attacks

Trust in the DGT depends on its ability to ensure the security of taxpayers’ sensitive information. Thus, the organization continually seeks to improve its security posture.

DGT has strengthened its security with BIG-IP ASM, which provides SSL visibility and protection against application and DDoS attacks. The solution also provides visibility into attacks, preventing the server from being compromised.