Sefaz-RJ overhauls tax management with Oracle Exadata Cloud@Customer

As the third-largest tax institution in Brazil, the State Finance Department of Rio de Janeiro (Sefaz-RJ) is responsible for the financial, accounting, and tax management needs of the state. The entity also has the highest non-tax revenue in the country, primarily from oil production in the Rio de Janeiro region.

While a significant portion of Sefaz-RJ’s tax services were already digitized, the organization needed to modernize its back office for data-driven decision-making. The department needed to process large volumes of data to create large-scale economic studies that support the economic and fiscal policies of the State of Rio de Janeiro, especially in light of national tax reform. It needed to overcome processing and storage constraints, which hindered performance, especially for analytical queries.

Because of its long-standing relationship with Oracle, the organization chose Oracle Exadata Cloud@Customer. The product also demonstrated extensive scalability, with the ability to expand processing and storage as needed. The ease of management would also benefit the organization’s smaller IT team and offer a more flexible contract model.

With availability of 99.9%, Oracle Exadata Cloud@Customer brought the continuity of transactional and analytical workloads. The team could quickly resize the infrastructure to handle access peaks, which was not possible in its on-premises environment. Sefaz-RJ's IT team could monitor the entire system from a single dashboard, while security also improved with the use of multifactor authentication for professionals interacting with the databases. Beyond these gains, the organization saw a 30X reduction in query execution time, which helped staff quickly create studies as well as gain greater access to quality data.

Finally, with the modernization of its infrastructure, Sefaz-RJ tapped the full processing power of the platform to implement data-driven decisions. The overall operational performance of the organization improved, including fiscal grid planning and execution, taxpayer services, and the ability to conduct economic studies that benefit the population.

To migrate to Oracle Exadata Cloud@Customer, the Sefaz-RJ team partnered with VSDATA, with essential support from the Oracle technical team. The process was completed in under 18 months, ahead of schedule.