Jakarta. Indonesia will break the ground for its first national data center in Bekasi, West Java, early next month,  Minister of Communication and Information Technology Johnny G Plate said on Wednesday. 

The data center would be the first of four data centers designed to store central and regional governments' data and public records. It would support President Joko "Jokowi" Widodo's initiatives to digitize all public services and make the records available for better planning and policies. 

"We are preparing to lay the groundwork for constructing the government's permanent data center. Hopefully, this can be carried out in early November 2022," Johnny said after an event for launching a data center owned by MettaDS in Jakarta. 

"We are building a data center, which will later consolidate all [the government's] data in the data center," he said. 

He said the government currently operates over 2,700  data storage or server facilities across ministries/agencies and local governments, often with different systems or standards. That made interoperability between agencies challenging to implement and hindered them from using data from other ministries. 

"After it is built, we hope there will be no more servers in each ministry or institution and no more servers in the regions. Everything will be placed in the center. While the data guardian or those who have access to the data are the respective ministries or institutions," the minister said. 

Apart from Bekasi, the government had decided to build three other data centers in Batam in Riau Islands, the new capital Nusantara in eastern Kalimantan, and Labuan Bajo in East Nusa Tenggara. 

Johnny said that all the data centers would be rated at the tier 4 data center category, the highest qualification for any data center in terms of their reliability. A tier 4 data center has redundancy for every component, with expected uptime of 99.995 percent per year.