Government working to host all Data Centres locally

The government is working to ensure all its external data in other countries will be hosted locally in Ghana.

This is to reduce the cost of operations and promote growth in the digital space.

The Minister for Communications and Digitalisation, Mrs. Ursula Owusu-Ekuful made this disclosure after addressing a validation workshop on data centre and cloud regulation in Accra.

The validation workshop by Smart Africa and the National Information Technology Agency (NITA) is aimed at getting stakeholders’ input for the enhanced regulatory framework for cloud and data centres in Ghana.

According to the Minister, this framework will lead to promoting the country to become the preferred choice for hosting African data.

She believes that hosting a localized data centre will support job creation in the digital space.

“We need to have the regulatory system in place to ensure that whatever achievements we have in the digital space is fully secured so this is very important to us. It’s absolutely essential that we provide the legal framework within which emerging technologies will operate so they don’t grow like weeds.

One key thing that we want to promote with this is the localization of the data in our country. We produce that data, it must be stored here. We don’t have anything against the Amazon cloud services and the big operators, let them build data centres here and host Africa’s data on the continent because it is expensive and we’re paying twice to host the data on other cloud services, pay for the management and pay for retrieval for our use, it doesn’t make sense” she said.

The Director of Digital Infrastructure, Skills and Empowerment at Smart Africa, Thelma Efua Quaye is optimistic that having a harmonized regulation system for data and cloud will boost investor confidence in the continent.

The government is therefore embarking on skills training for young entrepreneurs to take advantage of the growing digital space.