Vietnam pushes full online public services by 2025 amid sweeping legal reforms

Vietnam targets full online public services by 2025: what IT and dev teams need to build

Vietnam has set a clear deadline: all public services online by 2025. Ministries and localities are tasked to execute based on conclusions from Party General Secretary To Lam and the Central Steering Committee for the Development of Science, Technology, Innovation and Digital Transformation.

Policy work is underway on laws covering intellectual property, personal income tax, public employees, and anti-corruption, alongside programs to attract and grow talent in science, technology, and digital transformation. For engineering teams, this is a mandate to ship at national scale-securely, reliably, and fast.

Policy highlights that affect delivery

• Legal revisions: intellectual property (open-source use, code ownership), personal income tax (talent attraction), public employees (hiring, compensation), anti-corruption (audit trails, procurement transparency).
• Talent policies: build pipelines for developers, data engineers, security, DevOps/SRE, and product roles to run always-on citizen services.

What this means for engineering leaders

• Think platform first: a shared backbone for identity, payments, notifications, observability, and data exchange.
• Prioritize interoperability: standard APIs, schemas, and event contracts across ministries and provinces.
• Design for scale and trust: high availability, strong security, and verifiable integrity of every transaction.

Reference architecture (practical view)

• Access layer: National portal + mobile-first design, multilingual, WCAG-compliant, form autosave, clear status tracking.
• Identity and trust: eID/eKYC, single sign-on, digital signatures, timestamping, and non-repudiation.
• Service layer: Microservices where useful, fronted by an API gateway; async jobs via queues; idempotent endpoints.
• Data layer: Citizen and business registries, master data management, consent and purpose-based access, data minimization.
• Integration: National interoperability bus (API-first), canonical data models, event streaming for audits and analytics.
• Payments and fees: Multiple PSPs, reconciliations, refunds, chargeback handling, and automated invoicing.
• Observability: Centralized logs, metrics, traces, SIEM; per-service SLOs and error budgets.

Security and compliance checklist

• Zero-trust network access, MFA everywhere, short-lived tokens, key rotation.
• Encryption in transit and at rest; HSM-backed key management for signatures and seals.
• SBOMs, dependency scanning, license compliance for open-source (ties to IP law reforms).
• Immutable audit logs, fine-grained access control, four-eyes approvals for sensitive actions (supports anti-corruption goals).
• Regular pentests, breach drills, and third-party risk reviews; documented data retention and deletion.

Delivery tactics to hit 2025

• Scope smart: Identify the top 20-30 high-volume services; templatize flows (apply, verify, pay, issue, track).
• Reuse first: Shared components for identity, payments, documents, notifications, and analytics.
• Cloud strategy: Government cloud or approved providers; multi-AZ HA; disaster recovery with tested RTO/RPO.
• CI/CD and SRE: Policy-as-code, security gates, blue/green or canary releases, runbooks, and on-call with clear SLAs.
• Performance: Capacity models, load testing at peak season volumes, CDN for static assets.
• Inclusion: Accessibility, low-bandwidth modes, SMS fallbacks, offline submission where needed.

Data and interoperability standards

• API style guide (versioning, errors, pagination, retries) and a central API catalog.
• Canonical schemas for person, business, address, payments; schema registry and contract testing.
• Event standards for status changes, approvals, and issuance; guaranteed delivery and replay.
• Data governance: stewardship roles, lineage, consent logs, and DPIAs for sensitive processing.

Talent, procurement, and ways of working

• Cross-functional squads: product, design, engineering, data, security, legal/compliance.
• Hiring levers aligned with public employee reforms: market-aware pay bands, fast-track for scarce skills, trainee pipelines.
• Partner with local vendors and universities; clear IP terms and code escrow in all contracts.
• Outcome-based procurement: milestones tied to usable features, SLOs, and user adoption-not just delivery dates.

Key metrics to track

• Uptime per critical service (target 99.9%+), p95 latency, queue times, completion rate.
• eKYC success rate, signature validation failures, fraud flags per 1,000 transactions.
• Digital adoption vs. in-person, average time-to-issue, resubmission rate.
• User satisfaction (CSAT/NPS), accessibility score, and cost per transaction.

90-day action plan

• Week 1-2: Inventory all services; rank by volume and public value. Define non-negotiable standards (security, API, UX, accessibility).
• Week 3-6: Stand up SSO/eKYC, API gateway, observability stack, and a central service design kit. Ship two pilot services end-to-end.
• Week 7-10: Migrate 10 high-traffic services using the shared components; load test; set SLOs and on-call.
• Week 11-12: Security review, audit trails, procurement checks, and go-live rehearsals across ministries/provinces.

Useful references

• World Bank - GovTech
• UN - E-Government Survey

Upskilling for teams

If your roadmap includes AI-assisted services, process automation, or code assistants, align training now.

• AI courses by job role
• Popular AI certifications