Accra, June 16, GNA - The Ministry of Communications will soon commence implementation of the e-government infrastructure project to provide a national network for Ministries, Metropolitan, Municipal and District Assemblies.

Mr Haruna Iddrisu, Communications Minister, who announced this, said the focus of the project would be to provide a shared and secured interoperability of government IT architecture to ensure that IT platforms were more effectively unified, managed and aligned to provide better support for government applications. He said the Ministry in its bid to protect vital and confidential government and public sector information was constructing a national data centre to which the national portal would be linked on completion.

Mr Iddrisu was speaking at the 10th anniversary celebration of Ostec Ghana, a leading IT infrastructure and managed services provider, in Accra on Thursday.

The Sector Minister said to ensure the rapid development of the communications sector, government had empowered the governing institutions in the sector to perform the supervisory duties in an open and fair manner.

He commended Ostec for its contribution to the growth of the sector, especially in helping clients to cut down cost on the provision of IT infrastructure and management services. Mr Jonathan Tawiah, Chief Executive Officer, Ostec Ghana said the company had in the past 10 years contributed in providing IT services to huge capacity blue-chip companies in various areas. He said the company had enabled clients to consolidate their server, storage, network and security infrastructure support needs under a single point of contact.

"With our highly skilled human resource, we are well equipped to help IT departments and various business entities realise greater value from their technology investments. We have deployed and presently manage IT and communication services through the ECOWAS region," he said.

Mr Tawiah said Ostec would continue to leverage on its customised approach of delivering services to stay top of the competition and maintain its leadership in the market.

"We help clients reduce their support costs by 25-40 per cent. We also enable clients to leverage their existing infrastructure by providing support for all the servers and storage systems in their environment including end of life systems," he added.