President Yoweri Museveni officiated the launch of Uganda’s first Tier 3 National Cloud Data center in Jinja. This was at an event co-organized by NITA Uganda and Legends Events and Hospitality, with the project a part of the Government of Uganda’s strategy to stretch the provision of centralized hosting Services for Government Applications and Data.
The National Data Centre has been primarily set up to house all Government ICT applications, with an expectation of saving costs involved in hosting these applications independently, while collectively avoiding any further duplication and wastage of resources.
The National Data Centre will also host the Government Cloud, MyUG Cloud. MyUG Cloud will enable Ministries, Departments, and Agencies to focus their resources on service-based delivery rather than asset-based delivery.
James Saaka, the Executive director of NITA Uganda, stated that hosting the data locally and centrally will boost security, cost and boost efficiency. Additionally, it will be of advantage to the country since it is in charge of its own data as opposed to the risky international hosting.
He added that the Data Center has been built with key features to enable up-time of 99.98% with less than 1.6 hours of downtime per year, hence increased efficiency and effectiveness for government applications which improves service delivery.
In October last year, Raxio unveiled a plan to set up another tier 3 data center in the Namanve Industrial and Business Park. The company has a target market of the private sector and they earlier this year announced Hamilton Cloud Services as the first client.
Between 2012 and 2013, the Cabinet approved the Strategy for Rationalization of Information Technology Service across Government entities. The strategy was put across to eliminate duplication and wastage of resources.
Among the key activities that the Strategy looked to fulfill was the provision of a centralized Data Centre with hosting and Disaster Recovery Services for Government Applications and Data.
It is on that note that NITA Uganda started working on a Cloud Project, which was launched in September 2017 and finalized in June 2019, with support and funding from the World Bank under the Regional Communication Infrastructure Program (RCIP). This project upgraded the existing data center to a cloud-based tier 3 design certification.
