In cooperation with the Economic Development Cooperation Fund from the Republic of Korea, Ministry of Transport and Communications plans to construct an e-government integrated data centre to boost the government's e-services

The Ministry of Transportation and Communications is set to construct an e-government Integrated Data Centre in cooperation with the Economic Development Cooperation Fund from the Republic of Korea to boost government e-services.

Daw Nwe Ni Soe Yin, director of e-Government Department of the Ministry of Transport and Communications, told The Myanmar Times that the South Korean government has sent a draft agreement on the funding of the project. 

“In order to sign a mutual agreement, discussions are being carried out,” she said. After the discussions are completed, the cost of the project will be set.”

The objectives of building the data centre are to upgrade and combine e-government services that are now being conducted separately by each department. This will ultimately lead to better online services. 

“For government departments to be able to easily cooperate with one another, e-government plays a really important role,” said Daw Nwe Ni Soe Yin. 

“And the most basic need to implement development procedures for e-government is ICT infrastructure,” she said.

The data centre will be built in Nay Pyi Taw with tier-3 grade and will also have a backup system. A Disaster Recovery Centre (DRC) will also be established in Thanlyin township.

An electricity generator, UPS, heating, ventilation and air conditioning, firefighting and network systems will also be built with N+1 fault tolerance, which is a form of resilience that ensures system availability in the event of component failure. This will ensure that the centre will have a 99.982 percent uptime. 

“To keep the server, switch and storage of respective governmental organisations at the same location,  the data centre will have 500 racks and the DRC will have 100 racks,” said Daw New Ni Soe Yin.

She added that security systems such as DDoS, IPS, VPN, web firewall and network management system, server management system and facility management system will be included in the centre, and an operator room will be built to centralise the management. 

She said that cloud computing technology will also be used, so hardware usage will be reduced in the future.

The current government service, GSM network, will be expanded in Nay Pyi Taw so that the public will be able to use government services by connecting with the e-Government Integrated Data Centre, she said.

The construction of the data centre can offer advantages, such as the combinations of services, electronic system services, 24/7 services, simultaneous management, better security, lower costs and less time, Daw New Ni Soe Yin said. 

The e-government system was started in 2004, and the e-government index ranked Myanmar at 169 out of 193 countries in 2016, said U Thant Sin Maung, minister for Transport and Communications.

(The Myanmar Times: https://www.mmtimes.com/news/government-build-integrated-data-centre-s-korean-aid.html )

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