Tk 1,616 crore national data center, yet government data sits on a foreign cloud

Part of the National Data Center built at Kaliakair in Gazipur at a cost of Tk 1,616 crore has stopped working, forcing government data and services onto a foreign company’s cloud, according to media reports. The project’s software procurement, maintenance and cloud contract have also drawn a range of allegations.

Cost and plan

According to the reports, Tk 1,200 crore of the project’s total cost came from a Chinese loan and the remaining Tk 416 crore from the Bangladesh government. The original implementation period ran from 1 July 2015 to 30 June 2018 and was later extended by two years.

The design called for 744 physical servers in 152 racks with 2 petabytes of storage at the start, expandable to 200 petabytes.

The allegations

The reports say that although Tk 599 crore was allocated to buy licensed cloud software, people involved in the project are accused of embezzling around Tk 300 crore by using pirated software. The required preliminary and final acceptance tests and certification from the vendor, ZTE, were never completed.

The reports also allege that, without an annual maintenance contract or the necessary upgrades, a large share of the servers, storage, routers, switches and firewalls failed well before the end of their expected lifespan.

Government data on a foreign cloud

According to the reports, in December 2021 Bangladesh Data Center Company Limited (BDCCL) signed a three-year deal worth about $18 million with US company Oracle through direct procurement, without a tender. The contract required fixed capacity charges whether or not the cloud was used. In 2022, it emerged that data and services of around 34,000 government offices hosted on the ZTE cloud were being moved to Oracle’s Singapore-based cloud.

The reports did not include a response from the authorities concerned to these allegations.