Press release, 22 12 2022
KV Baltic has signed a contract with AB Lietuvos radijo ir televizijos centras (Telecentras) and UAB Agentus for the construction of two state data centres.
The two public data centres will be built in Vilnius, with a combined capacity of 288 server cabinets. These data centres are expected to centrally store and manage the data of several hundred public institutions and organisations that are part of the national Secure Data Network user group.
“This project is in line with the government’s strategy to consolidate information resources, ensure efficiency in their management and physical and cyber security. It is time to leave behind the technologically and energetically inefficient and insecure individual server rooms and to switch to a specialised, professional and state-of-the-art data storage system”, – says Agnė Vaiciukevičiūtė, Vice-Minister of Transport and Communications of the Republic of Lithuania.
The first servers and data arrays are expected to be available in these data centres by the end of 2023.
“The importance of this project in terms of the State Information Resource System and its rational management increases significantly, especially after 12 May, 2022. Amendments to the Law on Management of State Information Resources of the Republic of Lithuania,” says Remigijus Šeris, Director General of the Lithuanian Radio and Television Centre. – “The latter established that users of the Safety Net who choose to entrust the storage of data and information resources to a professional third party have, in principle, the only option for legal compliance – to purchase the services of data centres that are listed as public data centres and meet the security requirements of the State.”
Even before the construction work started, Telecentras invested more than €1 million in the national data centre expansion project. As part of the preparatory work, Telecentras has acquired an additional plot of land in Vilnius and is currently implementing a telecommunications interconnection project for the future data centres.
Data center design, project alignment, certification and building permit procedures were also carried out. Both data centre projects were inspected by UAB Ekspertika, UAB Statybos projekt ekspertizės centras, and Uptime institute, an international data centre certification organisation, which awarded the projects with TIER III compliance certificates.
“We are delighted that public data will now have a home. Having worked with public authorities for more than 15 years, we have seen the risks they take by storing important and critical data servers in unsuitable premises. The data centres we are designing will provide an important qualitative leap forward in the digitisation of Lithuania as a whole, opening up new opportunities for increasing the capacity of information systems, strengthening data security, and guaranteeing their uninterrupted operation and energy efficiency. These will be buildings that will meet the needs of each institution and will allow civil servants to focus on their daily work without distractions,” says Renaldas Galdikas, CEO of UAB KV Baltic.
“We welcome the decision to build new data centre buildings, which are really important steps to ensure the security of public data. We, as the general contractor, will guarantee the implementation of all the works over the next year,” says Saulius Jonaitis, CEO of UAB Agentus.