Thursday, March 28, 2024

Baguio City taps Oracle Cloud to boost on-prem operations for visitor portal

At the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, the city government of Baguio unveiled an online solution to keep track of the interstate visitor traffic, in line with its goal to safely restart tourism activities and reinvigorate the local economy.

Baguio Visita Oracle

Since its implementation, the Visitors Information & Travel Assistance (Visita) online registration system monitored roughly 360,000 residents and tourists.

To keep up with the increased workload and get a real-time data analysis of the city’s current situation under the imposed lockdown restrictions, the Visita platform will now be reinforced with Oracle Cloud services that include Oracle Container Engine for Kubernetes, Oracle Cloud Guard, and Oracle Web Application Firewall.

In a virtual presser, Baguio’s Tourism and Special Events Office division head Alec Mapalo shared how difficult the situation was when the city was suddenly devoid of tourists, similar to tourism hotspots around the world. He further added that the Visita platform was meant to help welcome back the city’s visitors and protect its residents at the same time.

“We selected Oracle Cloud for the Baguio VISITA program due to its enterprise grade performance, rapid scalability and simplicity of integration which enabled the system to go live in just one week. Since moving to the cloud, we have seen significant cost savings as compared to previously.”

Due to the sheer volume of data and analytics that the Visita platform required, Baguio City had to look for an alternative cloud provider. With the container engine designed for Kubernetes, the time and cost to build cloud native applications are significantly reduced. Meanwhile, the Oracle Cloud Guard security feature of the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure helps the local government units to detect and resolve misconfigured resources and insecure activity at a quicker pace.

“The pandemic has accelerated the pace of digitization. In the Public Sector the government departments and organizations have had to pivot quickly to provide services remotely to the citizens while ensuring their services are secure, reliable and compliant with local regulations. With the adoption of a strong cloud foundation the City of Baguio has been able to adapt quickly to serve the tourists while ensuring their physical safety and deliver on its smart city goals,” added Mina Lim, country managing director of Oracle Philippines.

Although the platform is currently limited to regulating entry and monitoring visitor mobility with the use of a QR-coded tourist pass, Baguio Visita will serve as an online portal for tourists after the pandemic. In its future iterations, it will be handling bookings, itineraries, regulatory fee payment processing, on-site assistance, and even emergency directories and connectivity.

Subscribe

- Advertisement -spot_img

RELEVANT STORIES

spot_img

LATEST

- Advertisement -spot_img