Along the sidelines of this meeting ITA signed a contract with Mideast Data Systems (MDS) for creating the Government Disaster Recovery Center in the course of realisation of Digital Oman. This event is held under the auspices of H.E. Al-Khasibi.

In response to the request for proposal by ITA issued in 2006 for a Disaster Recovery Center, MDS submitted suitable proposal and this contract results in awarding the project for execution. The Government Disaster Recovery Center initiative was put in place to provide a multi tenant Tier 4 level Data Center for Government IT departments to host their backup system, with the objective to achieve improved business continuity for their various IT systems.

"The DRC initiative achieves redundancy at all stages, and is intended to be third party certified for highest availability. It is also designed in such a way that will integrate seamlessly within the Government Network to effectively position the Government DRC as a service available on the Government Network" said Dr. Salim Al Ruzaiqi.

This Disaster Recovery Center will establish a common secure facility for housing Government IT systems with a professionally setup infrastructure with Tier-4 availability. The center will addresses the lack of a reliable infrastructure to house critical Government IT systems and will enable it to sustain the required mission criticality level. It also addresses the need for a disaster recovery strategy that is absent in almost all Government IT systems.

In the first phase MDS will build and equip the Data Center and will also train ITA personnel to manage the maintenance of the center. Phase 2 of this project will consist of the Operation, the day to day running of the center. Phase 2 contract negotiating is expected to be complete by the first quarter of 2008.

The Center will also have the setup for the environment necessary to house other ITA led eOman initiatives such as; Ubar Portal, Security Infrastructure, E-Payment Gateway and Public Key Infrastructure. Thus the establishment of the Data Center will assure business continuity in the delivery of e-services promoting high levels of availability for mission critical operations of e-government.