BELGRADE, Serbia, January 14, 2009 - Cisco today announced that the Treasury of the Republic of Serbia has implemented a converged and highly secure network infrastructure based on Cisco® technology. The new network connects 145 locations and more than 1,300 employees across the country.
With the completion of the project, the Treasury Department aims to fulfil several of its key objectives. The new network helps achieve smooth, highly secure and reliable communications with other state institutions, and it serves as a platform for the new Financial Management Information System, which is a prerequisite for meeting European Union standards and obtaining EU integration funds. With the intelligent network infrastructure in place, the Treasury Department is also able to launch a whole range of services and to provide information to citizens about the state budget and its expenditure.
The Treasury Department operates as an organizational unit of the Ministry of Finance. It is responsible for the preparation and execution of the state budget and budget law, the management of public finances, and all accounting procedures as well as all public payments, including the payment of wages for nearly 140,000 public sector employees. "We have to be up-to-date and efficient on a daily basis in order to execute more than 400,000 instructions per day. This requires a robust and complex information system that reliably supports our overall activities," says Ivan Maricic, the Treasury Department director.
To serve these needs, the Treasury Department was looking to deploy a reliable, high-performance platform capable of supporting current demands as well adding potential new services such as unified communications with minimum investment. All state-funded institutions were first connected by a single network, followed by the integration of external users. Milestones included the implementation of a wide-area network and virtual local-area networks, the connection of new locations over a dark fiber transport medium, and an upgrade for data replication between storage-area networks by using optical multiplexers.
The range of Cisco products chosen for the solution included Cisco Catalyst® switches for the access and the core infrastructure, Cisco coarse wavelength-division multiplexing products, and Cisco 2811 routers at the premises, along with Cisco ASA 5505 Adaptive Security Appliances.
About the Treasury Department of the Republic of Serbia
The Treasury Department is an organizational unit of Serbian Ministry of Finance which performs a whole range of fundamental activities and services that are crucially important for operating the state. This complex and capacious job is handled by currently 1,369 employees in Treasury, within a system of 111 branch offices and 34 subsidiaries.