By King’s Office Correspondents
BELGRADE, SERBIA: The Republic of Serbia has offered Eswatini four support areas for developing a data centre.
These areas include providing expertise and engineers, designing the centre, hosting (telehousing) government data or equipment, and using Serbian supercomputer capacities.
This was shared when His Majesty the King, accompanied by the Minister of ICT Savannah Maziya, met officials from the government Kragujevac Data Centre.
They were received by Adrijana Mesarovic, the Minister for Economy, Dejan Ristic, and Nikola Dasic, the Mayor of the City. Also present were Danilo Savic, the Director of the Data Centre, and the Director of the Office for Information, Technologies, and eGovernment.
In a presentation, the King was informed that the Serbian government data centre last year received an international certification according to the EN50600 standard for meeting the highest levels of reliability, security, and efficiency of equipment and data storage—a class 4 certificate (TIER 4).
It was also revealed that the Serbian government was recognised at the Global Summit in Dubai as one of the most innovative governments in the world.
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Its initiative to enable startups to work on the National Platform for Artificial Intelligence (AI) through a public call was singled out as one of the nine most innovative in the competition out of 1084 initiatives from around the world.
The Serbian officials also shared that to receive such certification, they had designed and built the facility by the strict requirements related to data centres.
These are;
1. The data centre must not be located within 400 metres of a chemical industry, research laboratories, landfills, or dams.
2. It must not be located within 800 meters of a railway, highway, or military base.
3. It must not be located within 1600 meters of an airport, factory of special/military industry, ammunition factory, or nuclear plant.
4. The location of the data centre must not have a history of floods and earthquakes in the last 100 years.
Global companies that use the government data centre include IBM, Oracle and Huawei.
Although it is yet to be disclosed which offer our government will take up, the two countries this week signed six agreements of cooperation, one of which is an MOU between the ICT ministries.
Monday afternoon.
The MOU intends to promote cooperation in science and innovation by undertaking a sustained effort to promote, facilitate and support collaboration between interested scientific organisations and companies.
The major aims of cooperation are in artificial intelligence (AI), agriculture, ICT, innovation, and research and development (R&D), digital transformation, entrepreneurship and start-ups, data protection, smart city development, capacity building and development.
The parties will collaborate through the exchange of best practices, organisation of joint events, exchange programmes, public awareness and engagement, evaluation and feedback mechanisms, and establishing cooperation between interested innovative companies and start-ups, among others.
Serbia is in the process of establishing a second, much bigger data center, while the country is on the verge of developingan innovation district.
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Within this facility, it was explained, there will be separate areas for IT—business incubators, start-ups, and areas for application of AI—in which there will be a centre for the development of robotics,
then a smart city centre for the development of smart energy systems, networking of smart infrastructure,
research laboratories, a centre for the promotion of digitization, and an area for bioinformatics and bioengineering with space for research and laboratories.
