Acronym: UNICC
Address: Palais des Nations 1211 Geneva 10. Switzerland
Stakeholder group: International and regional organisations
UNICC has over 50 years of experience as the largest strategic partner for digital solutions and cybersecurity within the UN system. We design and deploy transformational digital tools and programmes to support over 90 partners in fulfilling their mandates.
UNICC is committed to delivering innovative, forward-looking, reliable system-wide solutions in line with the UN Secretary-General’s Strategy on New Technologies, the UN Secretary-General’s Roadmap for Digital Cooperation, and the UN’s Common Agenda. With our world-class Cybersecurity Centre of Excellence, data and analytics practice, and an array of platform, software, and infrastructure solutions, UNICC serves the entire UN family and other international organisations with similar missions and values for the benefit of the world.
As a part of the UN family, UNICC espouses the same values that the UN embraces. As a strategic partner, UNICC’s guiding values are unmatched and underlie our continued growth: respect, curiosity, pride, passion, flexibility, honesty, and transparency.
Digital activities
UNICC provides core digital business services to UN agencies and related international organisations, including client services; support for innovative technologies, cybersecurity, data, and analytics;software as a service and cloud integration services; and infrastructure and platform services including network services, enterprise backup, ERP, web hosting, and enterprise collaboration platforms. UNICC offers cost savings, business efficiencies, and volume discounts based on the scale of its engagements. These services are designed to protect organisational assets, intellectual property, sensitive data, and reputation, and leverage the shared expertise of the umbrella of UN organisation, with shared innovative solutions being adaptable to client needs.
Digital policy issues
Digital solutions, services, and tools
The need for digital and technological solutions is at an all-time high across businesses and sectors. With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, all areas of humanitarian development sawanincreased callfor advanced technology products and services to respond to the many challenges the world faced. Digital transformation allows for more productivity, streamlined operations, cost efficiencies, agility, and resilience in ever-changing scenarios and is a catalyst for economic growth.
UNICC is responding to this growing need for digital business solutions with innovation and state-of-the-art digital business solutions tailored to many of its more than 80 clients and partner organisations. With UNICC’s shared services business model, clients can benefit from affordable, accessible, flexible solutions to support their mission delivery. At the same time, member states benefit because more UN entities are harnessing smart technologies to fulfil their mandates, reaching further into the field to support country offices and their results. UNICC continues to fine-tune many of these new technologies, and through strategic partnerships, their impact is even greater. For more information, visit the UNICC website.
UN Digital ID
To provide the UN workforce with a universal, easy-to-use, system-wide identity.
UN Digital ID is a unique identity for each UN staff member, from onboarding to retirement. Having a unique identification across the UN systemnot only reduces data fragmentation and duplication, but also simplifies and streamlines processes and transactions across all business functions between staff and organisations, and among UN organisations themselves. As a data exchange platform, UN Digital ID will allow staff from participating organisations to share any of their HR and related information with complete visibility, consent, and security.
UN Digital ID is part of UN 2.0, the UN Secretary-General’s push to achieve an efficient and data-driven transformation. Read more here.
UNICC Cloud
The first secure private cloud environment for the UN system
UNICC is partnering with Canonical, the publisher of Ubuntu and provider of open-source security, support, and services, to build and deliver the first secure private cloud environment for the UN system, providing cutting-edge security and data sovereignty for the UN’s most sensitive data and software applications.
UNICC Cloud leverages the advantages of cloud computing and the legal protections offered by UN Privileges and Immunities, with the unique added benefit of direct and independent control over data through nodes operated exclusively at UNICC data centres and the guarantee of UNICC’s world-class cybersecurity capabilities. The first node will be located in UNICC’s data centre in Valencia, Spain, thanks to the generosity of the Spanish government. Discussions to create additional nodes are underway with various UN member states. Read more here.
UNHCR and Regional Call Centre
UNICC Supports UNHCR Regional Call Centre for Ukrainian Refugees
The UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR), with the support of UNICC, has partnered with industry experts ServiceNow, British Telecom (BT), and Thirdera to set up a regional contact centre (RCC) for refugees fleeing the ongoing war in Ukraine.
Bringing together the best of Service Now, BT, Thirdera, and UNICC’s digital expertise and solutions, the new UNHCR RCC solution offers refugees a user-friendly, multilingual platform to access vital information on emergency services, assistance, and psychosocial counselling services as well as identifying vulnerable refugees and referring them to specialists for follow up support. The RCC also provides information on education, employment, healthcare, housing, and legal support. Read more here.
Cybersecurity
A cybersecure digital environment for the UN family
UNICC’s cybersecurity services cover oversight, governance, and threat intelligence sharing, as well as advisory services and a spectrum of programmatic and operational components. UNICC Cybersecurity has grown its global programme to serve over 50 UN partners and international organisations since its inception in 2017.
Services range from the Common Secure Threat Intelligence Network of over 40 UN organisations, to maturity assessments, ISO certification support, SOC and SIEM support, as well as security incident response and forensics, business continuity management, and industry-standard operational processes.
UNICC is certified with ISO 27001 and was awarded a 2020 and 2017 CSO 50 Award for its Common Secure Information Security services, demonstrating outstanding business value and thought leadership. Read more here.
UNRWA and Digital Services Hub
Transformative eUNRWA digital services platform and mobile app
UNICC recently provided the advisory support and technical know-how to help the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) build the eUNRWA digital services hub for refugees. Leveraging the technologies and framework built for theUNJSPF Digital Certificate app, UNICC streamlined a platform and mobile application for refugee online and mobile digital services.
The UNICC solution, scaled up to support potentially up to 5 million refugees, enables ‘life event‘ requests for services and documentation, including refugee birth and marriage certificates, work documentation, etc.
The solution went live successfully in all five fields of operations of UNRWA, namely, Jordan, Gaza, West Bank, Lebanon, and Syria, where more than 5.5 million refugees are registered with UNRWA. This solution is envisaged to provide a one-stop shop for Palestine refugees to profit from UNRWA’s digital services. Read more here,
UNDP’s AIDA portal
Artificial Intelligence powers UNDP’s Evaluation Office solutions
Independent evaluation offices play a major role in gleaning and sharing years of evaluation knowledge and experience for UN agency programme delivery. This is never an easy task. Finding valuable information is time-consuming, methodical, and often manual, with multiple sources and document types to process.
In partnership with UNICC and Amazon Web Services, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) launched AIDA 2.0 (Artificial Intelligence for Development Analytics), with new analytical capabilities in 2023. This cutting-edge solution streamlines the scanning of more than 6,000 evaluation reports to understand keywords, context, and intent using AI capabilities, returning meaningful answers to complex questions. New features include sentiment analysis, pattern detection, topic modelling and summarisation, and data visualisation.
With UNICC’s support, UNDP’s AIDA portal is accessible to Evaluation Office staff who want to learn from past evaluations to improve programme design and delivery, offering an innovative solution to search, find, and share lessons learned and build on successes from country programmes worldwide. Read more here.
Data Action Portfolio
Driving data for digital transformation across the UN family
The Data Strategy of the Secretary-General for Action by Everyone, Everywhere is a call to action for a data-driven transformation for building ecosystems that unlock the potential for global action on the SDGs. Data drives all aspects of the UN’s work and its power, harnessed responsibly, is critical to global agendas.
As the digital business and technology shared services hub for the UN, UNICC is uniquely positioned to heed the call, embrace, and implement the UN Secretary-General’s data strategy in every corner of the UN system.
UNICC is well-positioned with its Data Action Portfolio to assist UN agencies in implementing their alignments to the UN Secretary-General’s Data Strategy, taking their data programmes to the next level with humanitarian use cases across many UN agencies, in the areas of analytics, advanced analytics, data management, and data exchange as well as data governance. For more information, please visit the UNICC website.
International Criminal Investigations
Innovative technology and partnerships for international criminal investigations
The United Nations Investigative Team to Promote Accountability for Crimes Committed by Da’esh/ISIL (UNITAD) partnered with UNICC and Microsoft to support advanced data management for accountability in UNITAD criminal investigations, with UNICC offering Microsoft Azure hosting services, development, data and analytics, and cognitive services.
UNICC Data and Analytics, Application Development and Cloud Infrastructure teams supported the collection, preservation, and storing of evidence in the form of images, and audio, video, and digital text files that have been recovered from sources in the field. This solution streamlines evidence in independent criminal proceedings to hold members of ISIL accountable for the crimes they may have committed.
The partnership helps UNITAD fulfil its mandate in a more efficient and cost-effective manner by creating new business opportunities for UNICC clients and partner organisations to leverage for similar challenges with this innovative technology.Read more here.
Independent Evaluation Solutions
Artificial intelligence powers UNDP’s evaluation office solutions
Independent evaluation offices play a major role in gleaning and sharing years of evaluation knowledge and experience for UN agency programme delivery. This is never an easy task. Finding valuable information is time-consuming, methodical, and often manual, with multiple sources and document types to process.
In partnership with UNICC and Amazon Web Services, UNDP’s latest cutting-edge solution streamlines the scanning of thousands of evaluation documents to understand keywords, context, and intent using AI capabilities, returning meaningful answers to complex questions. This innovative solution, based on AI and machine learning (ML), is publicly available through UNDP’s portal, AIDA (Artificial Intelligence for Development Analytics).
With UNICC’s support, UNDP’s AIDA Portal is accessible to Evaluation Office staff who want to learn from past evaluations to improve programme design and delivery, offering an innovative solution to search, find, and share lessons learned and build on successes from country programmes worldwide. For more information, visit the UNICC website.
International Criminal Investigations
Innovative technology and partnerships for international criminal investigations
The United Nations Investigative Team to Promote Accountability for Crimes Committed by Da’esh/ISIL (UNITAD) partnered with UNICC and Microsoft to support advanced data management for accountability in UNITAD criminal investigations, with UNICC offering Microsoft Azure hosting services, development, data and analytics, and cognitive services.
UNICC Data and Analytics, Application Development, and Cloud Infrastructure teams supported the collection, preservation, and storing of evidence in the form of images, audio, video, and digital text files that have been recovered from sources in the field. This solution streamlines evidence in independent criminal proceedings to hold members of ISIL accountable for the crimes they may have committed.
The partnership helps UNITAD fulfil its mandate in a more efficient and cost-effective manner by creating new business opportunities for UNICC clients and partner organisations to leverage for similar challenges with this innovative technology. For more information, visit the UNICC website.
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