KARACHI: On 08 October 2024, the State Bank of Pakistan (SBP) established its state-of-the-art Tier-3 data centre, the first of its kind in Pakistan within its vicinity at head office, according to officials.
Previously, the SBP Karachi Campus comprised two Data Centers: the Main Data Center (MDC) located in the Main building. Ø Backup Data Center (BDC) is located in another building on the ground floor in the same campus 200 meters distance. These data centres have been migrated to form a newly constructed Data Center on the same floor of MDC in the main building.
The data centre is categorized from Tier 1 to Tier 4. The Tier 3 data centre has features including multiple paths for power and cooling and redundant systems that allow the staff to work on the setup without taking it offline. This tier has an expected uptime of 99.982% per year (1.6 hours of downtime annually).
22 data centres are operating in Pakistan. PTCL, PTA, NTC, PITB and Jazz also established Tier 3 data centres.
Analysts said the increasing digitization in the banking and financial sector does not only require the banking regulator to continue to upscale the capacity of data storage, but commercial banks also should set high-standards data centres within their vicinity.
