Ghanaian state institutions ordered to stop using private email for security reasons
To avoid security risks, state agencies and employees in Ghana have been given an ultimatum to halt the use of private email domains for official communication.
Local media reports that the Minister of Communication Ursula Owusu-Ekuful at the weekend said that by the end of the year, all government agencies should fully migrate onto the government domains.
“By the end of this year, we don’t want to receive any official communication from any ministry, department or agency on any email platform either than .gov.gh.,” the minister warned.
“That information is not your personal information, it is official communication, and it is government’s work so that must be on the government platform,” she added.
While addressing information technology professionals in the country’s capital, she called on them to help in achieving the smart country dream while being security conscious.
In June, the Tanzanian government ordered all state institutions to immediately change their website domains from .com to .tz in order to promote the country’s identity. A warning accompanied the order to those who would have failed to make the switch that action would be taken against them.
.tz is a Top Level Country Domain (TLD) maintained by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) that oversees its approval process. As of February 2017, there were 1528 top-level domains registered.
.com, .org and .net are the common domains used and are open for any person or entity to register. Country, government, education domains and institutional domains are restricted to the institutions and purposes they were intended for.
