ISLAMABAD: The Ministry of Information Technology and Telecommunication is prepared to impose the national cloud policy in all government, semi-government, and autonomous agencies after receiving approval from the Planning Commission.
As a result, no government department will receive financing from the development budget to build their own data centres in the future.
The IT ministry is expected to announce the Pakistan Cloud First Policy, which was recently approved by the federal cabinet. The ministry has already begun to take steps to ensure that no government agency is able to establish a data centre.
“It has been assured by the Planning Commission that there will be no allocation in the development budget for establishing data centres by any ministry or department of the federal government,”
Minister for IT and Telecom Syed Aminul Haque told Dawn.
Minister for Information Technology and Telecommunications Syed Aminul Haque told Dawn that any ministry or department of the federal government can set up data centres using funds from the development budget.
The minister stated that he would work with the finance ministry and other relevant departments to guarantee that autonomous entities that produce cash follow the national cloud strategy as well.
“However, NOCs [no-objection certificates] can be given by the cloud office if any department has to set up its own data centre and is unable to be part of the officially recognised cloud for various reasons,” the minister explained.
He said that the approach would not only assist Pakistan in adapting to the digital world in terms of global criteria, but would also save government departments a large amount of money.
Cloud computing is a technology framework that provides simple, on-demand access to a shared pool of resources such as servers, storage, and applications through the internet, according to the policy.
Following the policy’s adoption, government agencies will no longer be obliged to maintain their own hardware or software for data storage; instead, cloud service providers would manage and offer these resources.
These materials are accessible over the internet by not just the appropriate department, but also the approved user.
In contrast to an on-site data centre, where storage is handled by the company, the cloud service is fully off-site, and data is accessible over the internet from anywhere.
