The Ethiopian government has announced plans to build a national data centre to store information and statistics of all the federal institutions and citizens securely, Addis Fortune reported. The centre will be built by the Ministry of Innovation & Technology and will also offer cloud services, making it the first nationally hosted cloud facility. It will serve as the main data centre for the electronic government system where all the data processing and storage is done.
The data centre will provide cloud services, colocation and hosting to deal with business applications. The prospective centre is expected to be sited at the ICT Park close to Bole Lemi Industrial Park on the outskirts of Addis Ababa. Ethiopia's Silicon Valley is the home of many private operators such as ZTW, Techno Mobile and Security Innovation Network, among others.
The ministry has completed the preliminary design of the centre and has prepared a bid document to hire a company for a design-build contract. The bid document is expected to be announced in September, according to Ahmedin Mohammed (PhD), state minister for Innovation & Technology, who also said that the assessment to determine investment for the centre will be identified this coming week.
The launch process is expected to take a year. The construction is expected to have three parts: constructing the facility; deploying the data centre facility; and deploying cloud infrastructure. Ahead of building the data centre, the Ministry has drafted a Personal Data Protection Proclamation, which aims to address the gap in data protection and this has recently been tabled to the Council of Ministers for approval.
The first phase of the civil construction includes an entertainment space, cafeteria, dormitories, a disaster recovery site and green areas. The data centre facility includes electric power, efficient cooling, data centre environment monitoring, data centre safety, physical security, and network and security operating centres.
