ISLAMABAD, June 8: The Central Development Working Party (CDWP) on Tuesday approved a project initiated by the ministry of information technology for setting up a first data centre to house the federal government's database and form a secure internal communication infrastructure.

The project aimed at providing the basic IT infrastructure at all the federal divisions, ministries, and inter-connecting them through a secure data centre with a view to improve the speed of communications within the government besides increasing the productivity of government functionaries and enabling them to provide services to citizens efficiently.

The project would be implemented by Electronic Government Directorate, a subsidiary of the ministry of information technology, in three years at a cost of Rs452 million. It was approved at the last meeting of the CDWP held on May 18 and would be put to the upcoming meeting of the executive committee of the national economic council (Ecnec) for approval.

The objectives of the project include installation of Local Area Network with the provision of basic infrastructure to 22 divisions of the federal government and setting up of a federal government Intranet for providing inter-connectivity between the 35 federal government divisions through a high speed metropolitan area network (MAN), having a central data centre, which will work as the nerve centre for Federal Government Intranet and house the building blocks of this network; including core switch, firewalls, intrusion detection systems, central storage facility, a central server farm having database, messaging / collaboration, network management, customized applications for each division and secure electronic communications.

The project will also provide central management, technical support helpdesk and monitoring for the federal government's entire computer network. A centralized system for the document repository will be created in order to provide immediate access to federal employees to reduce the management time in searching and archiving of documents and improving security at different levels.

This will also be integrated with transaction-based database management systems to provide references, besides providing the record of memos, minutes of meetings and other day-to-day documents management and announcement from single platform.

Besides other things desired by the federal divisions, the central repository will contain different official manuals issued by all government organizations related to working of offices, various forms used within government offices, progress of Public Sector Development Programme (PSDP) projects implementation by different organizations, the observations and audit paras of the auditor general of Pakistan, decisions of federal cabinet and ECC and the directives of President and Prime Minister.

The project also aimed at creation of the Federal Employees Portal, which will be an internal portal where federal employees will get the information meant for them and can see what orders and memos are issued to the group of which they are part of. They will also be able to check their access and travel plans, meeting schedules, group tasks and announcement made for them by the federal government.