Punjab Chief Minister, Mian Shahbaz Sharif inaugurated Pakistan Telecommunication Company Limited (PTCL) Data Centre in the provincial metropolis on Friday. Speaking at the inaugural ceremony, he appreciated PTCL for improving its services, mainly after its privatisation. He however urged the company's president to further improve services to positively impact businesses.
He said the provincial government has provided Internet access to over 4,000 schools across the province, particularly in the far-flung areas. As a result, thousands of students are benefiting from the facility. He called upon PTCL leadership to play its role in discharging corporate social responsibility.
Speaking on the occasion, PTCL President, Walid Arshad said that the centre is the ever first certified data storage bank by an international body -EPI- which would provide state of the art products and services backed by engineering and support for the government and enterprise markets of Pakistan. The centre is an ideal choice for companies who want flexibility to house their primary, disaster recovery and/or business continuity sites and choose from a variety of cost reducing services as their business demands.
He said that the data centres are part of the overall PTCL-managed services approach which provides corporate customers not only reduced costs, but also improvements in the availability, performance, resilience and security of an organisation's IT systems. With a view to maintain its standard, there would be quarterly audit of the system, he added.
Appreciating experts' capability, Arshad said PTCL experts are now facilitating Sri Lanka in setting up information storage centre, thus, the company has achieved international recognition. When the broadband was introduced in Pakistan, it was not expected to get success but now Singapore has included Pakistan in the world broadband map, he said.
He observed that access of information is basic right of every citizen and they took it as mandatory to provide information to the public without exclusion and interruption. PTCL, with the inauguration of Karachi data centre earlier and now in Lahore, will have the largest geographically redundant commercial data centres in Pakistan, he added.
PTCL Data Centre provides customers managed and hosted cloud-based services that comprise of computing, processing, storage and software as services, application and infrastructure hosting, caging, co-location, disaster recovery, backup solutions, hosted business Solutions, and unified communications and tele-presence switching. The certification by an internationally recognised organisation ensures that the data centres provide a reliable, responsive and resilient infrastructure, designed and built using international standards and provides a secure, managed, climatically controlled environment for the housing and hosting of sensitive, mission-critical data and applications.
This will benefit the customers in terms of cost, efficiency and scalability of its IT systems while it would also allow businesses to protect critical applications and confidential data, enhance its IT operational efficiencies, and rapidly create new secure application environments to support new business processes. It is pertinent to mention that the PTCL has already established its data centre in Karachi.