NDC’s Disaster Recovery Centre inaugurated in Lahore

ISLAMABAD: Federal Minister for IT & Telecom Syed Amin-Ul-Haque on Thursday virtually inaugurated the Disaster Recovery Centre (DRC), Lahore, for National Data Center (NDC) of National Telecommunication Corporation (NTC).

The new site is a full-fledged data center which will not only work as a backup to the existing data center but will also provide enhanced capacity for provision of cloud based services to the Government of Pakistan with advanced features and security.The inauguration ceremony was attended by Secretary IT&Telecom Shoaib Ahmad Siddiqui, Managing Director NTC Brig (R) Viqar Rashid Khan, CEO Huawei Mark Meng, MD EBG Huawei GAO Weijie and others.Speaking on the occasion, Syed Amin-ul-Haque, Federal Minister for IT & Telecom, congratulated the NTC management for completion of an important project of DRC to strengthen the security and availability of government data.

The minister appreciated MD NTC for his leadership and management for the phenomenal development of ICT infrastructure in the public sector without any government funding.

Earlier, Managing Director NTC Brig (R) Viqar Rashid Khan said in his opening speech that this was a historic occasion for NTC to have achieved the milestone of establishing the DRC in Lahore. This day is also important as NTC has completed its 25 years’ journey. The site of Disaster Recovery is an integral part of NDC. In 2016, the NTC established a Cloud Based Tier-III compliant ISO 27001 certified National Data Center at Islamabad in a record period of five months. Since then, NDC has helped the government to implement e-governance, e-health, e-commerce and e-education plan in a transparent manner besides ensuring storage of government data at a secure centralized place.

During the Covid-19 pandemic, NTC National Data Centre acted as the main platform for hosting all the systems/Web/Mobile applications developed for data acquisition and data analysis, which assisted NCOC and other policy/decision makers. “Even during the Covid-19 pandemic, when every department was demanding special funds to fight against pandemic, the NTC earned profit of Rs578 million in the financial year 2019-20,” he maintained. He further said that this government entity had managed to complete 100 percent Annual Development Plan (ADP) during the financial year 2019-20, which is a record in the public sector. The NTC is probably one of the few federal level organizations which have recovered from a loss-making entity to a profitable and an efficient forward looking organization, he remarked.