Such a centre, that includes 1,600 square metres of technical space for dedicated computer rooms, was necessary because of the growing hosting requirements to satisfy the myriad of ICT solutions procured across government and planned to be procured over the next decade.
The needs to maximise levels of availability to offer 24x7 services and to operate in a greener way had also been identified. Meanwhile, the centre is to ensure increased physical security and business continuity requirements. It also caters for the need to adopt new technologies for economies of scale and efficiency.
Speaking during the opening ceremony, outgoing MITA chairman Claudio Grech said:
“MITA is a world-class data centre which will host critical systems for government and enable it to increase its ICT usage without restrictions for the next 20 years.”
He pointed out the project started in 2008 when the then IT agency MITS suggested that the government invest in a new data centre for the agency to be able to move from Gattard House, because the space there and at the Mater Dei data centre, was becoming smaller.
The MITA-01 premises opposite St Philip´s Hospital in santa Venera are government owned.
Planning took nine months and infrastructural works started last May.
“It was finished in a record time of seven months and involved huge complexity to synchronise all the works and data transfer,” Mr Grech noted.
He further explained that 14 tenders for works had been issued. Works were finished on time and within budget.
The building´s facade, which is inspired from a computer circuit board, and over which controversy resulted, took € 100,000 to finish. Yet the government is to get return from this through electricity bills in three years.
The data centre is Tier III, meaning it works for 99.98% of the time and only has a downtime of 1.5 hours annually, Mr Grech explained.
The systems it supports include teaching and the use of interactive white boards, as well as health services such as radiology, allowing for the transfer of data files.
Infrastructure, Transport and Communications Minister Austin Gatt described the project as “another dream come true”.
He has been responsible for the IT sector since 1998 when the concept of data centres was very much dependent on the capacity of people working in them. Since then, science has developed a lot.
Dr Gatt believes that our country does not grow in the IT industry if the government does not outsource services to the private sector. However, it decided not to outsource data for a number of reasons including financial and security.
It did not want to have the private sector managing the e-ID and e-Health services.
The centre is the first Tier III in Malta, ensuring high security levels – even though all systems are subject to attack.
The centre is part of the island´s forward-looking strategy for the next 10 years and new e-government services are envisaged on this.
The government has decided to go for cloud computing systems and the centre is to give the government the opportunity to do this. Furthermore, Microsoft´s innovation centre on cloud computing will be established in Malta in the near future and will be supporting this.
The government is planning to continue extending its online services. Currently, some 1,000 transactions take place on the e-payment gateway, amounting to € 51 million a year.
“Much of this country´s success was built on a vision and acknowledgement to invest in infrastructure and human resources,” Dr Gatt said. “Workers here give a lesson that the public sector can be equal or better than the private one.”
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Autor(en)/Author(s): Annaliza Borg
Quelle/Source: The Malta Independent Online, 08.12.2011
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