DICT bats for more data center funding
DATA CENTERS will require more funding from the budget to better handle the expected surge in data as the government digitizes, the Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT) said.
Speaking before the House appropriations committee on Thursday, Information and Communications Technology Secretary Ivan John E. Uy said the resources available to the DICT as the government migrates its systems to digital platforms are inadequate.
“Additional funding would be necessary for us to meet this growing demand,” Mr. Uy said, noting that the DICT is tasked with managing the National Government data center cloud services program, for which P325 million was budgeted. With this amount, the DICT must maintain 650 of the 1,277 government cloud systems. The data center budget, meanwhile, was set at P425 million.
“The ideal is P15 billion (for data center development), in fact we just submitted a proposal of P2.3 billion but what was approved (for data center management) is only P750 million,” Undersecretary David L. Almirol, Jr. said.
The DICT’s overall allocation was P10.43 billion in the National Expenditure Program for 2025, which Mr. Uy said will “allow us to expand our operations, enhance our performance and ICT governance, develop new systems and infrastructures.”
These funds will be allocated for, among others, the National Government Portal project (P302.86 million); and the e-Government System Development program servicing 45 National Government agencies (P1.37 billion).
The government has yet to complete its first data center despite growing computing needs and the need to keep sensitive data under Philippine control, Mr. Almirol said.
“Our first data center is still being developed. Right now, we are just co-locating. We do not have one,” Mr. Almirol said, referring to the government’s current reliance on the cloud.
“Data centers are important. Our government data, which is hosted by the DICT, should be ours and owned by the Philippines. Right now, it is outside the country, within cloud services. This is dangerous because we do not have our own data and are just relying on foreign cloud services,” Party-list Rep. Bernadette Herrera-Dy said during the hearing. — Ashley Erika O. Jose