$600m eGov Data Centre upgrade to boost efficiency in public sector
THE GOVERNMENT’S thrust to improve efficiency in the public sector has been bolstered with the upgrade of the eGov Data Centre.
Its modernisation included the renovation of the physical plant, expansion of information technology capacity and capability, automated management tools, and security components at both the primary Data Centre at eGovJa and the Disaster Recovery site at Digicel Caymanas.
The project, which incurred a cost of approximately $600 million, spanned four years and was managed by the Transformation Implementation Unit (TIU).
Speaking at a tour of the facility yesterday, Minister of Finance and the Public Service Dr Nigel Clarke noted that the renovation of the facility is a key aspect of the Government’s public sector transformation plan.
“As far as ICT transformation is concerned, it was about making the Government more efficient as regards the deployment and use of technology for carrying out the functions of government. And over the past four years, the Transformation Implementation Unit has been working along with eGov Jamaica to make the ICT transformation component of public transformation a reality,” he said.
The minister also lauded the improved capacity of the eGov Data Centre to enhance efficiency and security in the operations of the Government.
“Jamaica wins when we have an efficient data centre that can provide software as a service, infrastructure as a service, platform as a service, that the people in ministries and agencies can do their jobs without having to worry about those details,” he said.
PIVOTAL TO MODERNISATION
The project, which began in 2020, is pivotal to the establishment of a modern data-centre service with improved physical and information technology security, improved operational controls and monitoring, and a private cloud platform to host GOJ enterprise applications.
The Government-owned digital infrastructure aims to fulfil several strategic goals that include boosting the ability of Government to respond to the needs of citizens and businesses, improving publicsector resilience and recovery capabilities in times of crisis, strengthening cybersecurity and data privacy, increasing productivity, increasing interoperability and efficient data exchange, and offering cost reductions through consolidation.
Its cloud platform has also been upgraded, offering more volume for the Government’s private cloud services, with an increased raw-storage capacity, moving from 615TB to 1300TB.
Luke Jackson, ICT programme manager at the TIU, noted that the Government now has the bandwidth to implement a strategy to offer cloud services and consolidate independent machine data acquisition at operated data storage locations to ensure greater security and management of government data.
“A fairly large amount of money was spent … on the cybersecurity aspect of the expansion. We put in new VPN firewalls, put in an automated security system, put in a security monitoring system. So the security infrastructure at eGov has been upgraded … significantly,” he said, while describing the network as a “national asset”.