Technological progress has made it easier to develop information technologies in rural Lithuania, but it is still true that people in the countryside are less advantaged then their fellow citizens in urban areas when it comes to accessing IT. Lithuania has invested quite a bit of effort in projects which seek to support and strengthen IT in rural areas. One such project involves the creation of rural Internet access points (RIAPs), and this is now an important programme which is supported by the Lithuanian government.

Estonia’s Tax and Customs Board was one of the country’s first government institutions to create a user-friendly and rapid electronic communications channels for its clients. Most taxpayers in Estonia handle tax and customs business on the Internet, and it can now be said that all of the tax and customs obligations which relate to a broad user base can be fulfilled via E-channels.

When businesses make use of modern information and communications technologies, they can ensure a substantial return on investment by ensuring real time management of business processes, integration of internal and external processes, as well as support of innovative processes. Enterprises in Latvia and the other Baltic States have not been particularly active in making use of these opportunities. Even more, small and medium enterprises lag far behind larger ones, both for objective and subjective reasons. This creates great risks in terms of the competitiveness of the businesses. This paper sketches out the existing situation and offers a set of recommendations on what the state could do to improve the situation.

In a networked economy, a great deal of attention is devoted to the availability of server and application resources. There must be availability of servers, applications and network connections. The latter of these is often overlooked, and businesses can lose substantial revenue because of network outages. Here we take a look at different ways of ensuring mission-critical reliability without having to pay a fortune for it.