NITA-U unveils the first Government owned tier III data center in Uganda

The National Technlogy Authority (NITA) has today unveiled the first Governeent owned tier III data centre hosting a variety of applications riding on a 99.9% uptime norm. The newly launched data centre relies on the IT Authority’s National backbone internet (NBI) project to beam availability and a wide scope of cloud solutions to all hosted products led by Government agencies.

The new state of the at data center located in the heart of Jinja was officially opened by the head of state HE President Yoweri Kaguta Museveni. In his remarks, the president praised the tier III shape off as one of the bes IT invetions that will drive the country’s economy a notch higher with unitturpted service delivery from the hosted systems at the new Data Center.

Unlike any pther data centres in Uganda, the country has not had any known tier III version with Tier II’s and Tier I’s housed in Kmapala and telcommunication compnaies sharing private slots for cloud productivity for the past few years. Except for the fact that Raxio unveiled plans to construct a Tier III data center in Namanve last year, NITA-U’s launched version makes it the first of its kind in Uganda.

But Why a Tier III data center and how different is it?

NITA-U embarked on a cloud project launched in 2017 and finalised last month in June to improve on the rate of data availabality and uptime of Governement services in Uganda. However, with funding from World Bank under the regsional communication Infrastructe program (RCIP) the IT authority upgraded the exsiting cloud to a tier III design data version.

A Tier III data center is a location with redundant and dual-powered servers, storage, network links and other IT components designed with no single point of failure in its achirtecture. It is also known as as a Level 3 data center combining tier I and Tier II infrasturcture for upgraded network perfomance with an uptime rate of upto 99.95%

Luckily we got a chance to tour the NITA-U tier III data center in JInja, and its unique twist comes in from the size and industry standard setting it holds. The redundacy levels implemented at the data center make it the first state of the art invetion to hold IT systems with no point of failure as the NITa-U Executive Director commented.

Uganda now has the capacity to host all Government applications and Data. Hosting Data locally and centrally will continue to improve security, cost and boost efficiency. Plus, the country is in charge of its own data as opposed to international hosting which comes with security risks

NITA-U Executive Director James Saaka