Stakeholders in Ghana’s digital space are asking for a data centre in Ghana to keep proper records of the country’s critical information for current and future use.
“There has to be ownership of data because that’s the crown jewel of the digital economy,” said the CEO of BlueSpace Africa, Samuel Amanor, during a digital forum organized by Techgulf Ghana Limited.
“Data centres are key. You can’t have a digital economy without having a digital house and the housing component is the data centre. For cybersecurity, digital media and social media to work, you need a data centre. So we need data centre capabilities and infrastructure and talent force,” he advised.
Derrydean Dadzie, a Digital Transformation Consultant supports the idea. He also advocated for enhanced digital literacy for the right human resource to man the data centre efficiently.
He stated, “Digital skills development, from an electronic point of view and a taskforce point of view, has to be something that the key stakeholders have to always deliberate on and actually take actions towards it. We need to really set high targets for the number of skilled people that we need in a digital arena. But other than that, we are always going to have a skills shortage and people wanting solutions will actually go outside to get a skill.”
A data centre, according to Cisco, is a physical facility that organizations use to house their critical applications and information. A data centre’s design is based on a network of computing and storage resources that enable the delivery of shared applications and data.
Currently, Ghana lacks such a facility to man the country’s important data.
According to the National Information Agency (NITA), the government, as part of its numerous projects to build the e-government communication infrastructure network, plans to build a digital centre facility which will serve the entire government network with e-government applications.
The data centre will host many new applications and some applications that are currently being developed as pilot projects by government agencies.
But until that plan materializes, concerned parties in the digital space are intensifying calls for the data centre to be set up as soon as possible.
The Techgulf Digital Forum, which brought together the stakeholders for a conversation, was under the theme, ‘Operationalizing Ghana’s Digital Transformation Agenda’.