Cybersecurity problems can disrupt many services in a city, from healthcare and sanitation to transportation. In the South-Muntenia region of Romania, a new data centre will consolidate hundreds of fragmented government IT systems, boost digital security and improve services for nearly 300,000 people. This centre is the first of several planned by the Romanian government, serving as a model for nationwide coverage.
This project, which mobilised EUR 40 million investments through national and EU funds, will build the centres through public-private partnerships. The new data centre will provide cloud services for the private and public sectors. Once fully operational, the centre will serve over 3.1 million residents, enabling regional and national authorities to offer tailored digital services and providing citizens and businesses with faster, more secure access to public services.
“Data centres, whether for the cloud or for artificial intelligence, are now highly strategic for Europe,” says Yu Zhang, head of the European Investment Bank’s deep-tech division.
Centres like this one handle large volumes of data. They use a lot of electricity and need constant cooling. They also need security systems to protect the data. Instead of each public institution or company managing its own IT system in Romania, these data centres bring everything together under one roof. This reduces costs and improves security and service quality.
Artificial intelligence is dramatically increasing data volumes and the need for more data centres. As demand grows, so do the storage data challenges.
“The main big challenge we would see in the future is to ensure grid capacity,” says Andrés Gavira, a lead engineer at the European Investment Bank.
Many public institutions in South-Muntenia are running their IT systems separately. This makes management and security a big challenge, says Doru Mateescu, an EIB Advisory expert working for the JASPERS programme.
To help this data centre project, the EIB Advisory team reviewed the region’s feasibility study and it helped with a cost-benefit analysis and a climate assessment to ensure the project meets European Union’s requirements. The team also assessed the project’s technical, financial and environmental aspects and advised on project design, risk mitigation and implementation.
From the perspective of the Special Telecommunications Service (STS), the national agency responsible for this project, the specific challenges that the South-Muntenia Regional Data Centre aims to address are the lack of an efficient ICT architecture to manage electronic public services, and the shortage of ICT specialists who can ensure its development and maintenance.
Strengthening cybersecurity
The new data centre will process personal, governmental and business data. Therefore, strong cybersecurity is essential.
“Data is a resource – a critical resource for the future, as it is connected to our need to access water, health or transport services,” says Mateescu. “Until now, it was not perceived like this, but recently, after recent cyberattacks, everything is changing.”