By Syed Altefat Hossain
 
   DHAKA, Dec 17, 2021 (BSS) – The National Data Centre has enabled Bangladesh to discard foreign dependence simultaneously creating scopes to save foreign currency worth millions of dollars, after its inauguration two years ago as the world’s seventh largest high security data storage facility.
 
   Officials said the centre, a four-tier ICT facility in terms of cyber security, at Bangabandhu High Tech City (BHTC) in suburban Gazipur by now is saving Taka 353 crore annually through data localization in the country.
 
   “This is a four-tier data centre having ‘zero downtime’, meaning no service interruption, and 99.995 percent uptime” said a spokesman of the facility run by state-owned Bangladesh Data Center Company Limited (BDCCL).
 
   BDCCL officials said the cyber and infrastructure security of the centre was ensured further developing a three-tier backup storage facility called ‘disaster-recovery data centre’ at Sheikh Hasina Software Technology Park in southwestern Jashore district.
 
   The main data centre and the backup one was developed at Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s directive and supervision of her ICT affairs adviser Sajeeb Wazed Joy and opened in November 2019.
 
   BDCCL Secretary AKM Latiful Kabir said so far the Election Commission and nine government offices, including Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics and state-run banks and government’s e-filing systems and a2i, were preserving their data at the facility.
 
   “A process is underway to bring 12 more organizations under the centre’s fold but we are looking forward to serve the domestic and foreign entities with our unlimited capacity,” he said.
 
   The official said the centre was a cloud computing technology-based facility which was launched with two petabyte but by now “we have increased the capacity to 22 petabyte and planned to increase it to 200 petabyte soon.
 
 “Our eventual goal is to turn it into a G-Cloud facility using Oracle technology with unlimited capacity and render three services “Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS),” he added.
 
 Having the Data Localized and Standalone Backup, Kabir said, the G-Cloud facility will ensure safe protection of all data.  
 
Currently, he said, the centre required to spend US$45 million annually as licensing and renewing fees but switching to the G-Cloud facility would save the amount.
 
The data center certified by the Uptime Institute as the ‘Tier IV’ facility in cloud computing and G-cloud technology was awarded the Asia Specific ‘DCD-APAC Award 2019’ by the UK based Data Center Dynamics on September 17, 2019.
 
State Minister for ICT Division Zunaid Ahmed Palak termed the National Four Tier Data Center as the “brain” of the ‘Digital Bangladesh’ since there are hosted all the country’s data, including 55,000 websites, 11 crore National Identity Cards, e-Nothi, Surokkha and registration system.
Noting that the G-Cloud based data center will have unlimited capacity of preserving data, he said, “We hope we could launch the G-Cloud of Oracle technology within the next six or 12 months. And it will be the largest G-Cloud platform in the Southeast Asia”.