Service Provision for Designing a Secure Data Infrastructure Management Knowledge Stream

The Digital Investment Facility (DIF) is supporting the development of secure and resilient data infrastructure in Sub-Saharan Africa as part of the broader Data Governance (DataGov) in Africa Action, a 3.5-year Team Europe initiative. DataGov program is aligned with the AU-EU strategic partnership, fostering a human-centric and development-oriented data economy in Africa. Secure digital infrastructure is critical to achieving the objectives of sustainable economic growth, operational resilience, and trusted data governance. DIF is executed jointly by HAUS Finnish Institute of Public Management Ltd and GIZ (Deutsche Gesellschaft for International Cooperation). In today's data-driven environment, secure and efficient data infrastructure is essential to support decision-making, operations, and long-term growth. There is an evident need for support in physical security and cybersecurity issues of data infrastructure. In many African countries facilities hosting data infrastructure have faced violence, crimes and cybersecurity breaches with severe consequences that led to reputational damage and financial loss. Capacity to ensure safety and cybersecurity of data infrastructure is a critical factor e.g. in the planning and operation of data centres. To support stakeholders’ capacities and project design, technical guidelines on secure data infrastructure needs to be developed. The guidelines and training material thereof aim to ensure a smooth and uninterrupted data flow and that in the facilities data is stored, processed, and retrieved within a framework that maintains confidentiality, integrity, and availability, aligned with best practices and regulatory requirements. In the European Union securing these digital infrastructures is essential to protect both national security and individual privacy. Recognizing these challenges, the EU has introduced the 5G Toolbox as a framework to ensure secure, resilient, and trusted telecommunications and IT infrastructures. The toolbox emphasizes risk assessment, vendor trustworthiness, and cybersecurity measures that executors can apply to safeguard critical networks and data centres. A robust and comprehensive knowledge package on secure data infrastructure management is vital to equip the organizations with the skills and insights needed to protect against vulnerabilities, optimize data workflows, and meet regulatory compliance standards. This initiative will provide a structured approach to managing and securing data assets, promoting organizational resilience and data governance maturity. The objective of this procurement is to engage a qualified service provider to deliver practical guidelines and training material for secure data infrastructure management for the DIF knowledge provision and dissemination. The knowledge package should support in creating more enabling environment via capacitating infrastructure (e.g. datacentre and IXP) developers and promoters to apply practices for the establishment and management of a secure and trusted data centre infrastructure. A special emphasis is on cybersecurity; in an era of increasing cyber threats, this framework aims to protect sensitive data, maintain operational integrity, and ensure compliance with applicable regulations. E.g. The EU toolbox for 5G security could be utilised as a source in designing the guidelines. DIF is commissioning a seasoned consultant team to execute the preparation of the knowledge package under the supervision of the DIF team.