Bangladesh data centre market largely untapped

Data centre services business in Bangladesh has a huge potential in local market, the size of which is over Tk10,000 crore and which remains largely untapped, said the marker insiders. According to them, if Bangladesh fails to prepare itself to grab the market, foreign enterprises will take over. Explaining the importance of data centres, Masud Parvaj,  CEO of DCiCON, a data centre consulting service, said: “Information related to our National Identification (NID), BRTA driving licence, passports and banks or financial institutions are all stored in data centres. If you can’t preserve the data properly, it will cause massive damage to people’s daily life.” “If you look at the companies like Uber, you will see it has a huge data centre for smooth operation. We have a huge data centre services business of Tk10,000 crore. This is the high time we got to prepare ourselves, or else, foreign companies will grab our local data centre business which would be a tragedy for all of us. So, we shouldn’t waste time,” he said. Data centres are usually operated using one of two main models. The first is for an organisation to build, operate, and manage its own data centre for internal purposes, known as a captive data centre. The second is the outsourced model, where organisations lease space and host services from external data centre providers. Today, many organisations are moving from a captive data centre model to outsourced model because of zero capital investment, high operational efficiency and scalable infrastructure. According to a Frost & Sullivan (F&S) Asia Pacific Data Center 2017 report, while there is a greater adoption of managed hosting services (outsourced model), colocation services (captive data centre) continue to dominate data centre revenue. The report said this will continue to be driven by large enterprises and highly regulated verticals such as banking, financial services and insurance (BFSI), which require strict data confidentiality and complete management control of their operations. Md Yousuf Faruq, territory manager of Microsoft VMware Technologies, said: “Although we are still dependent on foreign countries, especially for technologies, we can still use our service delivery capacity and prepare ourselves.” Bangladesh government is building a high-technical data centre at Kaliakoir in Gazipur which will be the world’s fifth largest data centre. The data centre will be equipped with cloud computing and G-Cloud technologies. Building a “Digital Bangladesh,” there is no alternative to focusing on data centre services business, said the industry people. As the sector is at growing stage, Bangladesh needs to create awareness among the businesspeople concerned. Considering it, the Data Centre Professionals Network Bangladesh has arranged two consecutive summits in 2016 and 2017. Though it was a new initiative,  the response is very good. Over 50 applicants submitted their curriculum vitae.  They can get job not only in Bangladesh but also overseas. There were a large number of visitors in the two-day summit and Bangladesh got international branding for organising the summit. Uptime Institute is the IT industry’s most trusted organisation which  has adopted global standards for proper designing, building and operation of data centres – the backbone of the digital economy. If any Bangladeshi company can be certified by this institute, it will be trusted. They are planning to certify a few Bangladeshi companies. Meanwhile, Bangladesh Army, Bangladesh Computer Council, bKash got initial approval by the Uptime.