Pakistan Digital Authority Chairperson Dr. Sohail Munir visited the headquarters of the National Telecommunication Corporation and met with Managing Director Major General Retired Ali Farhan to explore strategic collaboration on a set of foundational digital infrastructure initiatives that will determine the security, self-reliance, and interoperability of Pakistan’s government technology systems.
The meeting covered five interconnected areas of collaboration that together constitute what both organisations described as the core layers of sovereign national digital infrastructure. The first is a government-wide directory service, which would provide a centralized, authoritative registry of government entities, systems, and users to enable structured access and coordination across federal institutions. The second is a secure government email platform, extending the work already underway through the National Information Technology Board’s BEEP initiative and anchoring official government communications within domestically governed infrastructure rather than commercial foreign-hosted services. The third is sovereign government cloud infrastructure developed in alignment with Pakistan’s National Cloud Policy, providing a locally controlled environment for hosting government data, applications, and services without dependence on external cloud providers.
The fourth area covers secure identity management, single sign-on systems, resilient cloud hosting, and secure communications across government institutions, establishing the authentication and access control architecture that allows a fragmented set of government systems to operate as a coherent, interoperable digital ecosystem with consistent security standards applied across every entry point. The fifth and most forward-looking area encompasses indigenous technology development, including secure government smartphones, Artificial Intelligence-powered offline meeting transcription and summarisation, and sovereign Artificial Intelligence infrastructure, addressing the hardware and intelligence layers of digital sovereignty alongside the networking and data hosting dimensions.
The Pakistan Digital Authority and the National Telecommunication Corporation closed their meeting with a shared commitment to accelerating collaboration and implementation across these initiatives, reflecting an alignment between the two institutions on the urgency of building Pakistan’s sovereign digital backbone as the government’s digital transformation agenda accelerates. The National Telecommunication Corporation, which has historically provided secure communications infrastructure to Pakistan’s government and defence establishments, brings complementary capabilities to the partnership that make it a natural counterpart to the Pakistan Digital Authority’s policy and coordination mandate in the digital transformation space.
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