MITA wins award for Public Sector Project of the year

The Malta Information Technology Agency (MITA) announced that the new Data Centre in Santa Venera, MITA-01, won the award for Public Sector Datacentre Project of the Year in the 2012 Datacentre Solutions Awards held on Wednesday in London.

The aim of the Datacentres Solutions Award is to reward the products, projects and services as well as to honour entities operating in the data centre fields.

Commenting on the award, MITA Chairman Godwin Grima said that they were proud of receiving the award as well as the positive feedback and recognition from their industry peers.

“We strive to provide the government with infrastructure that achieves true business continuity.  This award is a real acknowledgement of Government’s investment in ICT and in MITA as the Agency providing a cost-effective ICT hosting environment which meets the forecasted long-term hosting capacity of the Information Systems requirements of the Maltese Government. In particular the award is also in recognition of the MITA personnel who worked towards the success of this project,” Grima said.

Datacentre Solutions is an international prestigious publication by Angel Business Communications covering all aspects of data centre technology across Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) and is available to qualifying IT professionals. 

The Public Sector Datacentre Project of the Year award recognised the organisation’s implementation of a data centre project, centred on the driving force behind the project, the business and technology challenges it addressed, its innovative aspect, and the tangible benefits as a result of the project.

In 2011, the winner of this award was the British Transport Police.

“The DCS awards are voted for by the readers of our wide range of print and online publications and this year we had a significant increase in the number of overall votes.  All finalists did well in making the shortlist but MITA was the clear winner in its category Public Sector Project of the Year,” CEO of award organisers Angel Business Communications Bill Dunlop said

A judging panel of respected UK editors and analysts were entrusted with short-listing the entries and announcing the ‘Finalists’. 

Shortlisted in the same award category as MITA was the Westgate School, a leading education facility in Winchester, UK. 

Following the short-listing process, the public was then invited to vote for one finalist from every category.

The award ceremony was held on Wednesday 23 May at the Millennium Gloucester Hotel and Conference Centre in London and was attended by distinguished guests and some 200 professionals from this field.

Inaugurated in December 2011, MITA-01 is a state of the art data centre putting into play a broad portfolio of Government ICT initiatives covering Healthcare, eLearning, eGovernment and other Government back-office functions based innovative and cost effective solutions such as virtualisation and open source technologies. 

The project was executed in a timely manner of seven months and within the estimated budget of €7 million.  This investment was aimed at Value for Money and aligned with successful business models to guarantee the highest return on investment (ROI) and reduce operational costs. 

Government will be benefiting from large savings on its hosting costs from its previous methodologies and third party hosting.

This is not the first time that MITA-01 has achieved international recognition.  In 2011, MITA-01 attained the highly recognised and sought after international accreditation from the Uptime Institute for the TIER III Data Centre Design. Data Centres with a similar accreditation level include, United Nations (Spain), Government of Canada, Posta Italiana (Italy), Fujitsu Services (UK) and Samsung Electronics (Korea).  MITA-01 is also in line with the stringent EU Code of Conduct for Data Centres policies and guidelines.  

In December 2011, MITA-01 also managed to win the prestigious Malta Engineering Excellence Award.  These awards, held annually by the Chamber of Engineers, recognise engineering excellence in the areas of innovation and leadership in Malta.