The Information Technology Authority (ITA), represented by Dr. Salim Sultan Al Ruzaiqi, CEO of ITA, and Oman Broadband Company (OBC) represented by Eng. Said bin Abdullah Al Mantheri, CEO of OBC signed an agreement for the implementation of a private and resilient fiber optic backbone for Oman Government Network (OGN).
This agreement will be directly implemented to connect the current 63 governmental entities hosted by OGN providing high speed connectivity and linked to the National Data Centre at ITA in addition to another backup data center.
On this occasion, Dr. Salim Sultan Al Ruzaiqi, CEO of ITA states: “We are pleased to sign the first phase of the high speed government network with OBC to implement and operate the current active network. The first phase of this implementation will cover 63 HQs for all government organizations in the Muscat region replacing the current lower speeds of OGN. The new network will connect the mentioned HQs with the previous 1GB connectivity and will connect them to the ITA National Data Centre (NDC) with a 10 GB backbone.
This new service will enable government organisations to enhance the service quality and hence better customer satisfaction for their provided services. It will also enable government organisations to integrate by exchanging data to facilitate a true end-to-end service delivery for their customers. The new service will also enable government organizations to focus on their core business by taking part of the Government Cloud and the National Government Data Center state-of-art managed services. ITA looks in the near future to connect regional office of all government organizations with similar speeds in multiple phases of the project,”
This new service is also an essential milestone in the implementation of eTransformation plan adopted by ITA, as it will help transfer data and procedures in high speed. We, at ITA, will spare no effort to facilitate the completion of this project successfully through following-up, support, guidance and consultation.” Dr. Al Ruzaiqi concluded.
Eng. Said bin Abdullah al Mantheri, CEO of OBC pointed out that this step is one of the important objectives of the national strategy for broadband and to support and enable eGovernment services. The implementation of this network will work to remove obstacles related to fast data transfer which is currently a challenge to the implementation of eGovernment services. Al Mantheri added: “This network will transfer data between these government entities significantly as this would serve to unite all government data in a unified national data centre.”
While providing each government entity with one Gbps, which stands for Gigabits per second throughout fibre optic connection and is faster than the current speed by 1000 times, the period of implementing the interconnection project will not exceed 12 months from the date of signing the agreement.
