The only data centre in New Zealand owned by the Government is progressing on its chosen site at the Whenuapai Air Force base. The importance of ensuring sovereign control of security-related and other sensitive data has led to the unique status of this project according to the Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB) and Security Intelligence Service (SIS) “given the need for some of [their] information to have additional protection against malign actors”.
The stated cost of the build will be $300 million and, some nine years after planning began the data centre is on track for completion in 2025.
While security and the consideration of “jurisdictional, sovereignty and privacy risks” dominated the planning for the data centre, cost and ‘value for money’ were also strong drivers in the process. The build represents the delivery on the thinking behind a strategy paper in April 2016 which indicated that for holding more sensitive government data, “any solution which involves non-sovereign hosting of data has been excluded.”
