Bangladesh
China-Bangladesh Chinese assisted National Data Centre in Bangladesh faces failure
Beijing has often been in news for supplying sub-standard and faultyequipments/arms/airplanes to its neighboring countries.
Now, an incident of failure of Chinese assisted National Data Centre has been reported in Bangladesh.
The Chinese-assisted National Data Centre (NDC) of the Bangladesh Data Centre Company Ltd. (BDCCL) is facing problems these days in storing government data owing to un-licensed/ pirated software supplied by the ZTE of China.
The use of pirated software has led to failure in updating software and hardware patches, damage to one of the firewalls and considerable reduction in storage capacity, claimed to be 2.1 Petabyte.ZTE has offered to rebuild the NDC using its Cloud service, which may involve huge costs.
Till then, they are holding back on offering full services. It has always been a ploy of Chinese companies to first set up a faulty infrastructure and then blackmail the recipient country with huge costs to rectify and restore the system to its full capacity.
Meanwhile, the failure of Data Centre has compelled Bangladesh Government to look for alternate data storage companies, for storing the government data, post-filling up of the storage capacity of NDC.
The Bangladesh government is already in talks with Oracle Cloud, US which has proposed to provide sovereign-hosted cloud services to the Bangladesh Government. Simultaneously, negotiations are also going on with a few UK-based companies.
The credibility of China in the protection of personal data was hit badly when during Feb 12-15, 2023 the express delivery sector of China was itself afflicted by cyber theft leading to the leakage of private data of 4.5 billion customers.
Anheng Information Co.Ltd, one of the leaders in the network security industry in China, had reported that a ChatGPT or an automated query robot had leaked 4.5 billion pieces of personal information in China pertaining to e-commerce or express logistics industry.
Users only needed to enter mobile phone numbers to query private information such as name, mobile number and detailed delivery address.
This data breach reflected poorly on the data protection measures adopted by the Chinese government to protect the personal information of individuals.
Data is the most valuable asset in today’s world and its loss can be detrimental to growth or, in the worst case, it could result in the collapse of an economy.
The Bangladesh government needs to think as to how can a country guarantee protecting data of other country when personal data of its own people has been compromised.
