The government is set to build a national data centre, where all the necessary information and statistics of all federal institutions and citizens are securely kept and stored. The centre is to be built by the Ministry of Innovation & Technology and will also offer cloud services, making it the first nationally hosted cloud facility.

It will serve as the main data centre for the electronic government solution where all the data processing and storage is done following trending cloud service architectures. The data centre is expected to give cloud services, colocation, and hosting to better deal with business applications.

The prospective centre is expected to lie at the ICT Park, which is located close to Bole Lemi Industrial Park. Ethiopia's Silicon Valley is the home of many private operators such as ZTW, Techno Mobile and Security Innovation Network, among others.

The Ministry has completed the preliminary design of the centre and has prepared a bid document to hire a company for a design-build contract.

The bid document is expected to be announced this month, according to Ahmedin Mohammed (PhD), state minister for Innovation & Technology, who also said that the assessment to determine investment for the centre will be identified this coming week.

"Although the country has a lot of data centres that are mainly institutional-based, both on the private sector and the government side," he said, "this infrastructure is going to be no like other."

The launching process is expected to take a year. The construction is expected to have three parts: constructing the facility; deploying the data centre facility; and deploying cloud infrastructure. Ahead of building the data centre, the Ministry has drafted a Personal Data Protection Proclamation, which aims to address the gap in data protection. It has recently been tabled to the Council of Ministers for approval

The first phase of the civil construction includes entertainment space, cafeteria, dormitories, a disaster recovery site and green areas. The data centre facility includes electric power, efficient cooling, data centre environment monitoring, data centre safety, physical security, and network and security operating centres. Included in the cloud infrastructure is cloud management software, storage devices and networking devices.

The Ministry and the management of the ICT Park have signed an agreement to secure the space, however, the ministry has yet to receive the land. The Ministry is in negotiations with the Ethiopian Investment Commission and the Industrial Park Development Corporation to conclude the land agreement.

The new facility will be a tier III data centre, a system that operates without any notable service disruption. It will have a redundant and dual-powered server, network links and other IT components.