ISLAMABAD: Jazz Digital Park (JDP) established with an investment of more than $8 million was inaugurated here on Monday which will also provide onshore cloud service to help provide data storage capacity in the country.

JDP will accelerate the country’s digital transformation ambition by significantly improving the existing level of IT services being provided to various sectors.

Inaugurated by Kaan Terzioglu, the VEON Group chief executive officer (CEO), JDP is Pakistan’s largest telecommunications industry association (TIA) tier-III certified data centre in terms of white space and power capacity.

Jazz has announced to utilise the digital park to offer secure IT infrastructure and hardware hosting facilities to businesses as well as local start-ups.

The park will also be hosting the new cloud platform about to be launched by Jazz and the onshore cloud will be a significant step forward in ensuring that data created in Pakistan is hosted within the country.

“Utilising our leadership position in Pakistan and global expertise, we are focused on creating a flourishing digital ecosystem in Pakistan,” Kaan Terzioglu said, speaking at the inauguration.

The park will also serve as a key enabler of digital operator strategy and is in line with the mission of the company to simplify digital infrastructure challenges for local and regional enterprises, he added.

Jazz also plans to facilitate the Pakistani startup ecosystem by offering cloud credits under its premium startup accelerator programme “Jazz xlr8” at the National Incubation Centre.

The cloud infrastructure is not only expected to reduce the entry barrier for upcoming Pakistani startups but is also expected to enable existing startups to accelerate their scaling up programmes.

JDP is equipped with four-directional fibre connectivity, 100pc redundancy for all power and cooling systems, other modern requirements and performance optimised data centre solution to reduce its carbon footprint.

Aamir Ibrahim, CEO Jazz, said since the pandemic and the subsequent acceleration to digital platforms, businesses across various sectors are reassessing their cloud adoption strategies and cloud readiness.

He said the digital park represents a milestone for the country’s ICT industry as it is expected to simplify digital infrastructure challenges faced by the local businesses.

Published in Dawn, January 25th, 2022