PRESIDENT Ferdinand ‘Bongbong’ Marcos Jr. visited a data center in Angeles City, Pampanga a week after issuing a directive to update government data classification, establishing a data residency framework.
The chief executive went to the Angeles Data Center of fiber broadband and digital infrastructure provider Converge ICT Solutions Incorporated, where he was greeted by the humanoid robot ‘Convo’.
He was joined by Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT) secretary Henry Aguda, Converge co-founder and chief-executive-officer Dennis Anthony Uy and Angeles City mayor Carmelo ‘Jon’ Lazatin II.
Mr. Marcos was amazed with ‘Convo’, who greeted him with a handshake, even as he also interacted with the dog robot “Convi”.
Converge is offering its 12-megawatt AI-capable Angeles Data Center—which also houses its Cloud system—as a localized ‘sovereign cloud’ for the government.
This is in line with the Executive Order (EO) No. 119 signed this month, which updates the government’s decades-old data classification framework with the aim to “strengthen data sovereignty, enhance cybersecurity, and support the secure digital transformation of government through unified rules on data classification, data residency and cross-border data transfer.”
“This infrastructure enables state agencies to migrate their systems out of costly, foreign-hosted servers and into a secure, highly protected facility operated entirely within national borders,” Uy cited.