As crimes and terrorism are on the rise in the cyberspace, Bangladesh Police is now emphasising on boosting its own infrastructure to tackle the new front.
The government has recently given the green light to a Tk 1.54 billion project for upgrading the central data centre at the headquarters.
In an effort to streamline its services, the police have already introduced several initiatives including, the 999 emergency helpline, Crime Data Management System (CDMS), Citizen Information Management System (CIMS), the IGP Complain Cell and BD Police Helpline.
Earlier this month, the Executive Committee of the National Economic Council (ECNEC) approved police data centre capacity enhancement project.
The project paves the way to install a centrally controlled data centre having security, reliability, tier-III (Tier-III Complainant) that will improve law and order for contributing towards the socio-economic development in the country.
Data obtained from these services are now stored in separate servers, the new data centre upgrading project aims to preserve those centrally.
The data centre at the headquarters now has a storage capacity of 60 terabytes (TB), which obviously is failing to cater the need of the huge data the law enforcers now have to deal with.
This single data centre stores all kinds of digital information, including the 36 apps launched by police to ensure smooth and fast citizen services, which means whenever the server is down the entire suite of digital services is unavailable.
Moreover, it lacks a data backup system as well as security measures to defend against hacking attempts.
The new project will address all these issues as well as upgrade the storage by three petabytes (1000 TB=1 petabyte) with an option further raise it to six petabytes.
“The nature of crimes have changed now, especially there has been a rise on cybercrimes in the digital marketplace have increased. And it has opened up the need for using technology to prevent these. The new police data centre will be able to store and manage all data from the e-policing services,” Deputy Inspector General (DIG) Harun-or-Rashid told Bangla Tribune.
The new data centre will host the planned applications, which would use for e-services, he added.
The senior official, who heads the logistics wing of the headquarters, said the recommendations were made by the consultancy firm, which was later cleared by experts from BUET, Bangladesh Computer Council and the IT people of Bangladesh Police.
Bangladesh Police under the Ministry of Home Affairs will implement the data centre project from July 2018 to June 2021.
Under the project, the number of online application will be increased alongside upgrading the existing applications aimed at ensuring e-policing.