The Government of Kenya is in the process of setting up the base infrastructure required for electronic service delivery. This emerged on Tuesday morning at the opening session of the second CIO100 Annual Symposium which opened at Nairobi's Safari Park Hotel.
This was came to fore when the ICT Secretary at the Directorate of eGovernment, Dr Katherine Getao was making her Keynote presentation during a plenary session. Informationa and Communication Permanent Secretary, Dr Bitange Ndemo also spoke at the session outlining more on what the government was doing to enhance service delivery.

The Directorate of eGovernment which is in charge of electronic service delivery in the government is heavily represented at the symposium which has a track dedicated to eGovernment. Several government officers will be showcasing some of the projects that the government has implemented and those that are still under implementation.

Dr Getao said that the government plans to launch its first data centre in the next one month. The Government Data Centre (GDC) is located at Ruaraka and has a capacity of 24 terabytes and an additional 32 terabytes of storage as backup. The Data Centre has capacity to expand to about four times its current capacity according to Getao.

The GDC costs the government Ksh. 1.1 million per month in electricity bills. Getao says that the operational costs of the GDC are not delivering much value to the government at the moment. This she explains is due to ministries operating their own data centres in the ministries. "It's a matter of balance and power. I have to persuade ministries to share their data and centralise it highlighting the benefits of sharing," she says.

The GDC was conceptualised in 2008 with the aim of centralising management of government storage. Benefits to be achieved include better utilisation of skills for the date centre, lower operational costs and ability to provide better service delivery on the infrastructure.

The government is also working on another data centre which will act as a disaster recovery centre for the GDC. The second data centre will be situated in Naivasha.

The government is also in the initial planning stages of a third data centre - the National Data Center - which will be built as a public-private-partnership and will be situated at a site near Kangemi. The National Data Centre will be under the Ministry of Information and Communication and will have 6 floors. A detailed master-plan for the data centre is available from the Information Ministry.

The GDC is already linked to a Government Common Core Network (GCCN) which in turn interlinks several ministries within Nairobi. The GDC will also be linked to the recovery data centre in Naivasha while the GCCN is expected to be connected to 28 counties through the National Optic Fibre Network (Nofbi).

Dr Ndemo on his part said that the country needs to increase its power generation capacity to at least 5000 Megawatts in the next 5 years to support demand. He estimates each data centre to consume about 200 Megawatts.