Major IT Projects in Pakistan Public Sector

[Riaz Haq]

IT projects ranging from automated meter reading and computerized land records management to online education and mobile banking are now at various stages of implementation across Pakistan.  In a report released today, the World Bank calls these projects "unprecedented in the public sector in developing countries". The objective of these efforts is to reduce corruption, increase productivity and improve service delivery in both private and public sectors. Here's a brief description of five key areas where information technology penetration is visible:

1. Automated Meter Reading:

Automatic Meter Reading (AMR) project has been rolled out across the country with the help of United States Agency for International Development (USAID).  It is aimed at reducing power theft which accounts for 20-30% of all power generated in Pakistan. It will provide accurate electronic meter readings with little human intervention, using technology to transmit meter readings data via GSM/GPRS and Radio Frequency. It is expected to help power distribution companies (DISCOs) to monitor electricity consumption trends for different consumer categories, understand demand patterns, reduce electricity losses significantly and increase their revenues. Initial AMR pilots indicate significant reduction of power theft in Lahore.

In addition to automatic reading of consumer meters, smart meters have been installed with the support of USAID on incoming and outgoing feeders at all nine government-owned electric utilities. These will help move toward building of a smart national grid to better manage power generation, transmission and distribution in the country.

2. Mobile Governance:

The Punjab government is deploying smartphone applications to crack down on absentee mobile government workers and their corrupt practices. As part of this project, the government employee must send his or her picture and a report of interaction with citizens along with GPS coordinates. For example, a agricultural pest control official required to visit farmers must file reports of his findings and actions in real time via a smartphone app.

An agricultural field monitor uploads a picture of himself and spotted pests on crops using a smartphone. This data is used to ensure visits happen and create easily-accessible time and spatial data. Source: World Bank

An SMS soliciting feedback from citizens is sent out after each such visit or interaction. Responses from users are logged into a central database, and the data then analyzed and mapped. Call centers have also been trained to contact those who do not respond or are unable to read the text due to illiteracy.More than three million users of public services have so far been contacted since the summer of 2012, with both positive and negative feedback, according to the World Bank report. “Sir, we went to the hospital yesterday. They asked for 1500 rupees [in bribes]. We didn’t have the money so we left,” reads one of the reports about a hospital in Lahore, the provincial capital. The feedback is actively monitored by the office the Chief Secretary – the top civil servant in the province – to manage the performance of officials.

Results of Google-sponsored Survey in Pakistan Source: Express Tribune

3. Computerized Land Records:

Provincial land departments in Pakistan regularly show up as the most corrupt in Transparency International surveys conducted every year. In fact, most Pakistanis refer to the culture of corruption in Pakistan as "patwari culture". For the uninitiated, a patwari is a low level official in the land department responsible for keeping land title records. Corrupt patwaris either deliberately misplace such records or delay issuing land title papers when citizens refuse to pay bribes.  With digitization of such records, citizens will be able to check and confirm titles to lands on a computer screen by entering  their computerized national identity card (CNIC) number. Corrupt patwaris are trying to undermine the computerization project.

4. Education and Training:

Pakistan has been at the forefront of using information technology to increase literacy and offer higher education. A pilot program in the country has demonstrated the effectiveness of pushing mass literacy through the use of cell phone text messaging capability.

A UNESCO has recently also started a post-literacy project in Pakistan based on mobile technology. The Mobile Based Post Literacy program is targeted at young rural women, aged between 15 and 25, by keeping them interested in literacy through the mobile phone.

The concept of virtual instruction is finding its way to K-12 education as well. Increasing number of Pakistanis are drawn to various online sites. Silicon Valley NEDians have launched Learntive, an effort to offer digitized lessons in high-school courses.  Virtual Education for All is a local Pakistani initiative extending the concept to primary level.

Virtual University(VU) and Allama Iqbal Open University (AIOU) offer distance learning programs using information technology. Pakistan's Virtual University (VU) has won the Outstanding New Site Award 2012 for an Open CourseWare website which was created in 2011.

5. Mobile Banking:

Combination of growth of mobile phones and ease of mobile money transfers have enabled many Pakistanis to have access to financial services for the first time in their lives.

In a country where only 22% of the population owns bank accounts and more than 70% owns mobile phones, mobile banking is proving to be the fastest way to promote financial inclusion considered by experts to be essential to lift people out of poverty. Benefits include easy access for rural customers to banking services through agents in villages without bank branches, better documentation of the economy, enlarging of the tax-base and efficiency of economic transactions.

Summary: 

Increasing use of computers and mobile phones is enabling broad adoption of information technology in Pakistan. It has the potential to increase transparency, enhance individual productivity and improve standards of living of ordinary citizens.

Related Links:

Haq's Musings

Mobile Internet to Overtake Desktop in 2014 in Pakistan

Biometric Information Technology in Pakistan

Power Theft in Pakistan

Mobile Banking in Pakistan

Mass Literacy Through Mobile Phones

Online Education in Pakistan

Pakistan's Telecom Revolution

[Riaz Haq]

#Pakistan completes #SmartGrid project for #Multan regional power grid in #Punjab. http://www.metering.com/smart-grid-funding-pakistan-completes-usaid... …

In Pakistan, electricity distributor Multan Electric Power Company (Mepco) has this week announced completion of a smart grid project in Multan, Punjab province.

According to local media, the USAID-funded project to upgrade Multan's regional power supply system has to date minimised the utility’s technical losses and unscheduled load shedding.

Addressing journalists during a press conference, Mepco’s chief executive Fazalullah Durrani said beside establishing a new power distribution control centre, 48,000 capacitors installed on tube-wells has helped the utility in improving power supply saving 70MW and energy worth Rs2 billion (US$18.9 million). 

Mr Durrani added that the 40,000 smart meters installed to residential and industrial consumers in Multan, Vehari and Khanewal cities under the Rs7.3 million (US$69,172) worth project launched in 2010, have helped to improve the utility's billing system.

Mepco has also installed single phase smart transformers in congested areas of Multan and replaced bare-conductor LT lines with 600km of aerial bundled cables to improve power supply and public safety, reported Business Recorder.

Smart grid funding

The development follows a series of agreements between Pakistan and international institutions to upgrade utilities grids.

Lat week, the Asian Development Bank (ADB) signed two contracts with the government of Pakistan for combined loan assistance of US$800 million to boost the country’s power sector.

According to the ADB, the first contract worth US$400 million will fund the Power Distribution Enhancement Investment Program aimed at the installation of an advanced metering infrastructure system for power distribution companies across Pakistan.

Metering & Smart Energy International reported, that the AMI development programme will improve utilities’ load management and reduce non-revenue losses.

The distribution enhancement program will be carried out in phases, with each phase comprising installation of smart meters, computerised customer billing and information systems of two to three distribution companies in Pakistan’s major cities, and industrial and commercial hubs.

The other US$400 million loan will be streamed towards funding Pakistan’s Sustainable Energy Sector Reform Programme supporting ongoing policy reforms to build an affordable, efficient and secure energy sector.

Commenting on the development, ADB’s country director for Pakistan, Werner E. Liepach, said: “With demand for electricity outpacing supply inefficient and inadequate transmission and distribution systems are key bottlenecks in the development of the energy sector that is stifling growth and threatens social strife.”

[Riaz Haq]

#Pakistan’s #energy sector forging alliances for(university, industry) research and #technology http://go.shr.lc/2aGraLb via @Shareaholic


The launch of US-Pakistan Centre for Advanced Studies in Energy at National University of Sciences and Technology (USPCAS-E) by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) in collaboration with the Higher Education Commission (HEC) and Arizona State University (ASU) is an effort to fulfill this pressing national need. This partnership builds on existing talent in Pakistan by providing university faculty with exposure to new technology and an opportunity to collaborate with other experts in their fields.

Akif Zia Khan, faculty member at USPCAS-E, NUST, who is specialised in smart grids technology, visited Arizona State University (ASU) this year to attend a series of meetings on curriculum, lab equipment, and applied research projects with peer faculty and fellow researchers at the Power Systems Research Centre (PSERC). His collaborative work with Dr George Karaday of PSERC during his stay at ASU is now playing an instrumental role in developing new curriculum and availability of modern power hardware in the loop smart grids laboratory for Electrical Energy Engineering Programme at USPCAS-E at NUST.

He said the facilities available in smart grids laboratory would help the researchers to model, simulate and validate different domains of electric power grid adding that the power quality analysis and energy auditing can also be performed with the equipment available with this laboratory. The various entities under the umbrella of Pakistan Electric Power Company (PEPCO) as well as industries, which can utilise the available facilities in the laboratory for development and validation of their prototypes, Khan said.

Akif Zia Khan said the opportunity for him to participate in different technical workshops and events hosted by the IEEE Power and Engineering Society chapter at ASU resulted in an extraordinary capacity building of the faculty under this exchange programme and Khan is committed to replicate the same teaching and experimental facilities at NUST campus that he observed at ASU.

Dr Naseem Iqbal, assistant professor at USPCAS-E, NUST, who specialises in fuel cells technology, visited ASU under the same exchange programme. Dr Iqbal worked with a research group at the Polytechnic School, ASU, led by Prof A M Kannan, a renowned expert in fuel cell technology.


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The US-Pakistan Centre for Advanced Studies in Energy initiative is part of USAID's larger US $127 million investment in collaboration with Higher Education Commission (HEC) that will harness applied research to find innovative and practical solution for Pakistan's energy, water, agriculture, and food security challenges.

USPCAS-E is designed to support Pakistan's economic development by strengthening the relevance and responsiveness of universities products, including applied and policy research along with skilled graduates, in accordance with the needs of the public and private sector.

USPCAS-E, in collaboration with academic research, emphasising on practical, solution-based, industry-specific research and development, both for the training and development of students, and for providing support to the Pakistani university.

[Riaz Haq]

How #Pakistan Is Fighting #Crime and #Corruption With #Technology @Diplomat_APAC http://thediplomat.com/2016/12/how-pakistan-is-fighting-crime-and-c... …

In the education sector, PITB’s “Smart Monitoring” initiative has proved highly effective in improving the performance of public schools by collecting real-time data on different key performance indicators. Under this initiative, each of the 36 districts in Punjab are monitored on an individual basis by the government’s monitoring officers, who are tasked with visiting and reporting on 52,695 public schools registered across the province every month. The activity of monitoring officers is geotagged to ensure their timely visits. To make the process more open and transparent and increase citizen’s participation, all collected data in this regard and its real-time performance and monitoring have been made available online for public access.

To combat terrorism, crime, and enhance the performance of police, different tech-based initiatives are being put in place. The automation of Punjab’s Counter Terrorism Department (CTD) as well as digitalization of the criminal database and suspect profiling have helped in the apprehension of number of suspects who have previously evaded justice. A few months ago, one suspect with multiple identities was recognized as one person by the Punjab police due to the effective use of a digital criminal fingerprint database, which is being implemented across the province.

Furthermore, the PITB-developed Crime Mapping (CM) software has facilitated police in identifying some of the long established and emerging crime pockets in the province. The software has also proven valuable in helping the provincial law enforcement agencies in conducting electronic crime investigations, devising better strategies to preempt, discover, and control criminal acts. Moreover, to tighten a noose around hardened criminals and terrorists, the police in Lahore has made it essential for all hotels to use the “Hotel Eye” software in order to monitor the record and information of all visitors and guests staying there. In the last two months, the city police have been able to arrest 43 criminals from different hotels in Lahore by using the software.

Above all, besides improving transparency, CM software will also help in reducing the much reported and rampant corruption in police department. In this regard, reforms related to “Paperless Policing” such as real-time monitoring of police stations, online FIR submissions and screening of the investigation progress, and biometric attendance of police personnel is being employed. Currently, the initiative is being used in Lahore but the government plans to expand it to the entire province.

The agriculture sector is another area where the provincial government is making much needed technology based interventions. Among other efforts to improve the sector, Punjab government is planning to provide smart phones to about 600,000 farmers in the province to better the output of crops.

The explosive boom of Pakistan’s IT industry has begun to penetrate into almost every sphere of public sector by offering new tools and systems to improve their performance. The trend is being noticed at all levels: Plans are underway to conduct the next national census with the effective deployment of technological methods; Pakistan Railway is preparing to computerize its ticketing system; and Pakistan customs will soon be using smart phones for snap checking vehicles on the roads, which could help in the identification of illicit smuggled goods and traders.

“Every level of government can be managed and is required to be managed using IT in this new digital world. Introduction of robust mobile technologies has made it absolutely essential for governments worldwide to introduce IT-based customer services in each department,” maintains Bilal Bajwa, a consultant and analyst at the Rockwell Automation.

[Riaz Haq]

VMware partners with NTC to support government's Digital Pakistan initiative
The partnership will enable the state-owned National Telecommunication Corporation to support the Pakistani government's digital transformation initiatives.
Tas Bindi
By Tas Bindi | September 26, 2017 -- 23:10 GMT (16:10 PDT) | Topic: Innovation

http://www.zdnet.com/article/vmware-partners-with-ntc-to-support-di...

VMware has signed a memorandum of understanding with Pakistan's National Telecommunication Corporation (NTC) to "drive digital transformation within the public sector" as part of the government's Digital Pakistan initiative.

Under the agreement, the state-owned corporation -- which inaugurated Pakistan's first datacentre in Islamabad in August last year and offers a range of ICT services including broadband, IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS -- will be able to use VMware's solutions to "modernise" existing IT infrastructure, simplify IT management, decrease operational and ownership costs, "strengthen" the availability and security of critical applications, and speed up network expansion to underserved districts, NTC said.

The corporation said these intended outcomes will be enabled through the use of VMware Cloud Provider Program, VMware vSphere with Operations Management, VMware vCloud Director, and VMware Site Recovery Manager.

"We are determined to better serve the public by strengthening IT and telecommunications support to all government institutions. With the right infrastructure together with the best solutions, we can better provision and provide for market trends now and in the future to drive Pakistan's digital transformation," Viqar Rashid Khan, managing director at NTC, said in a statement.

The Pakistani government claims it is the first nation in South Asia to move to an e-governance model as internet penetration in the nation rises. According to the government, which cited statistics from Hootsuite, the number of internet users in Pakistan increased by 20 percent in 2016, double the global average growth rate. Three in four internet users in the nation are accessing the internet through their mobile phones, compared to 27 percent via desktops.

"The government's bold step towards a fully e-government structure is testament to the powerful benefits from a software-defined approach to IT. By implementing a ubiquitous IT architectural plan that cuts across all levels of compute, network, storage, clouds and devices, NTC stands to benefit from the scalability, agility, and security required to enable Pakistan to truly succeed in the digital era," Adrian Hia, general manager of Nascent Markets & Vietnam at VMware, said in a statement.

VMware, which has operated in Pakistan for three years, also recently signed an agreement with Meezan Bank, Pakistan's largest Islamic bank, to "modernise" the bank's IT infrastructure across more than 500 branches in nearly 150 cities in Pakistan.

Through its partnership with VMware, the bank aims to increase the performance and efficiency of IT resources through virtualisation, speed up the delivery of solutions via private clouds, and improve the availability of critical applications.

[Riaz Haq]

Punjab, Pakistan has just transformed its land record management system. What can we learn?
Ede Ijjasz-Vasquez's picture
SUBMITTED BY EDE IJJASZ-VASQUEZ

https://blogs.worldbank.org/category/countries/pakistan

Land is an essential resource for sustainable development. From large cities to remote villages, land remains one of the most important assets for many people, especially the poor.

Worldwide, only 3 out of 10 people have a legally registered title to their land. Difficulties associated with land administration and registration systems, together with inequalities of land distribution and tenure insecurity, often hinder social and economic development.

In Pakistan, the province of Punjab faced such a challenge. For many rural landowners in the province, land titles weren’t easily accessible, nor were they properly managed and protected. To tackle the land administration challenge, the government of Punjab turned to an innovative solution: they used digital technology to modernize its old, inefficient paper-based land administration system.

Supported by the World Bank, the Punjab Land Records Management and Information Systems (LRMIS) project turned out to be one of the success stories for the province of Punjab. Within just five years, Punjab scanned 10 million pages of old records, digitized over 55 million landowners’ records—98% of all records—across the province, and made all rural land title information available online 24/7 for landowners.

Prior to the project, it would take up to two months to complete a land transaction in Punjab. Today, it takes a rural Punjab resident only 50 minutes to receive a digitally recorded, legally registered land title from one of the 144 newly created land record offices across all 36 districts of the province. This has helped the province of Punjab enhance the transparency of land administration while securing land rights for its people, including women farmers who were denied their land rights in the old system.

In this video, World Bank Senior Director Ede Ijjasz-Vasquez (@Ede_WBG) and Muhammad Zafar Iqbal, Director General of Punjab Land Records Authority, discuss in detail the past, present, and future of the Punjab LRMIS project.

Going forward, the government of Punjab plans to expand digital land record management to its urban areas. Cities and villages alike in other countries can also learn from this successful project and innovative approach to land administration

[Riaz Haq]

My six years with the government
By Dr Umar Saif Published: May 30, 2018

https://tribune.com.pk/story/1722328/6-six-years-government/

Punjab has totally computerised its land revenue system (aka notorious Patwari system), where land record of over 54 million rural landowners has been digitised. This new computerised system has been used to issue over 8.2 million fards and perform over 4.5 million property transactions.

Likewise, all 713 police stations in Punjab have been totally computerised, including all previous criminal biometric record. Over 2.1 million computerised FIRs have been registered using this system. We have replicated the system in Sindh and last week, the Punjab and Sindh Police started integrating their system to better coordinate their activities across provincial boundaries. Similarly, we also replicated our investigation system for the K-P Police’s counter-terrorism department at their request.

A comprehensive case-flow management system has been installed at the Lahore High Court to ensure that cases can be tracked, scheduled and monitored throughout an automated system. Over 150,000 cases are now being processed using our automated case-flow management system.

A large number of property disputes arise from fake and back-dated stamp papers. Pakistan’s 117-year-old arcane stamp paper system also causes significant pilferage in stamp duty due to undervalued property transactions. To eliminate this, we have replaced all (high denomination non-judicial, and all judicial) stamp papers with e-stamps. Citizens can now buy e-stamps with a uniquely traceable verification number from a private bank, starting with Punjab Bank. Over Rs75 billion e-stamps have been issued throughout the province and a pilferage of over Rs10 billion annually has been eliminated.

Pakistan’s public-sector school education system is plagued by ghost schools, teacher absenteeism, bogus student enrolment and poor quality of education. We developed an extensive school monitoring system in Punjab, where monitoring officers carry out random inspections of each school every month using our application on computer tablets. The uploaded inspection reports are geo-tagged and include pictures of the attendance register and school headmaster. To date, over 2 million inspections have been carried out and ghost schools have been entirely eliminated. All this data is made publicly available in real-time at http://open.punjab.gov.pk. We also digitised all the textbooks in Punjab from grade 6-12. This content is freely available at http://elearn.punjab.gov.pk and is being rolled out in over 1,000 middle schools in Punjab.

[Riaz Haq]

#Pakistan Citizen's Portal #app, launched last year by #PMImranKhan, wins 2nd spot among 4,646 #MobileApps from 87 countries competing in #Dubai at the #WGS earlier this week. #Indonesia came out on top while the #UnitedStates stood at the third spot. #PTI https://www.dawn.com/news/1463589

The citizen's portal app was developed by a team in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa "free of cost" in a "record time of 45 days", the prime minister said.

"This is the first time any government-owned mobile application [has] reached this level in Pakistan."

So far, around 250,000 out of 420,000 complaints that were registered through the app have been resolved with 55 per cent 'satisfactory' feedback from the public, according to statistics posted by Prime Minister Khan.

The application has a 4.5 rating on Google Play and a 3.5 rating on Apple Store.

The World Government Summit is a non-profit organisation, that holds an annual event in Dubai. According to its website, the World Government Summit is a "global platform dedicated to shaping the future of governments worldwide". The organisation aims to "set the agenda for the next generation of governments" to tackle both global and local challenges with the help of technological innovations.

The event held by the World Government Summit serves as "knowledge exchange platform" by bringing together governments and private entrepreneurs. Leaders, entrepreneurs and experts from over 150 countries are invited every year.

[Riaz Haq]

Punjab seeks WB loan for land mapping project

https://www.dawn.com/news/1550979

The Punjab government is seeking a loan of $150 million from the World Bank for a land mapping project for accessing land records and for housing programmes in the province, it is learnt.

The proposed project aims to achieve provision of a cadastral map (a map that shows the boundaries and ownership of land within specified area) linked to digital land records, access to land for housing and a unified modern land information system.

As a first step towards the land mapping, the project envisages installation of geodetic control points (permanent reference markers placed in the ground to support the production of data collection for surveying and mapping projects) and generating base maps (maps having only essential outlines and used for the plotting or presentation of specialised data of various kinds).

These geospatial (data that is directly linked to specific geographical locations) products could then be made accessible to a larger community for a variety of decisions which could contribute to the National Spatial Data Infrastructure (NSDI) initiative in Pakistan, according to project details. The proposed project also aims to have revenue maps scanned and made available in digital form.

ARTICLE CONTINUES AFTER AD

With regard to digital cadastral maps, the project intends to inform the public and in case disputes arise, safeguards have been promised to be placed for the mediation and resolution of the land mapping disputes. The new cadastral maps would then be linked to the land records in the Land Records Management and Information Systems.

Another major reason given for seeking the World Bank loan for this particular project is that both federal and Punjab governments say they will not be able to achieve the goal of “Naya Pakistan Housing Programme” of constructing nearly 2.6 million low-cost housing units in Punjab if the province’s urban land record challenges are not resolved.

Under the “Punjab Growth Strategy 2023”, the provincial government plans to increase the average number of housing units to 640,000 annually over the next five years.

[Riaz Haq]

The term (dead capital) is usually attributed to Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto and his famous book The Mystery of Capital. Briefly put, what De Soto and his team found was that lack of formal rights were turning productive assets into ‘dead capital’ as they could not be traded on formal markets. The blame, De Soto argued, lay not with participants of the informal markets (mostly poor people) but with a plethora of stifling regulations that render productive assets ‘dead capital’.

https://www.dawn.com/news/1628702

Before De Soto, Adam Smith articulated in his famous Wealth of Nations that the real wealth of a nation is the potential of a particular productive asset to contribute to the economy. But if such assets are confronted by legal and institutional morass, then they will remain unused and underutilised.

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Like physical capital, a lot of intellectual capital-related business ventures die because the laws required to facilitate them are absent.

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Capital, though, is not just physical capital; in fact, in today’s world, intellectual capital (ideas, innovations, etc) assumes even bigger importance. People often talk about Silicon Valley and its importance to the US economy. The place is all about ideas and innovation, about intellectual capital. To illustrate, the US government earned $30bn in 2020 as ‘charges’ for the global use of intellectual property originating within its borders. Further, a 2016 report by the US Commerce Department (Intellectual Property and the US Economy) found that IP-intensive industries support 45m jobs, plus contribute $6tr to the US economy.

This intellectual capital would be dead if it were not for facilitating business transactions, primarily through laws (patents, trademarks and copyrights). Like physical capital, a lot of intellectual capital-related business ventures in Pakistan die because the laws required to facilitate them are not present. EMI, a music recording giant, wrapped up its business from Pakistan as losses accumulated due to the absence of IP rights, leading to pirated music.

A similar case is that of pharmaceutical products, especially drugs, where patented drugs are easily copied and sold in Pakistani markets, thus limiting the scope of the market for originator brands and proving to be a major detriment to attracting FDI inflows in this important industry.

Perhaps most crucially, we need to be cognisant of the fact that GDP is but a summation of mutually agreed transactions that benefit all the parties involved. A simple rule of thumb for any policymaker, therefore, is that to increase GDP we would need to increase and facilitate transactions. On the flip side, the loss of a probable transaction is a ‘dead’ opportunity.

For a country of approximately 220m, there are potentially trillions of mutually beneficial transactions that can considerably change the economic tide. But given the stifling of economic activities through byzantine regulations, beneficial transactions remain subdued, incomplete and at the mercy of inconsistent economic policies. We do not have a monetary count, but it would not be surprising if such a count comes out someday, informing us that our economy’s opportunity cost of working under stifling regulations runs into trillions of rupees. In essence, the opportunities that can perpetuate exchanges resulting in trillion-rupee activities are killed, hence turning them into dead capital!

It is time, then, to tackle the issue of dead capital seriously. Any attempt at a higher growth trajectory would remain incomplete without it, especially the role of public sector-led regulations that pervade all aspects of our economic activity.

The writer is an economist and Research Fellow at PIDE.

[e-mail]

[Riaz Haq]

Montreal, Quebec--(Newsfile Corp. - December 2, 2022) - Virtury Cloud announces the launch of its specialized cloud services powered by its PDC-ISB01 Data-center located in Islamabad, Pakistan to offer businesses around the world a more reliable, low-latency cloud environment at a much lower cost compared to other cloud solutions.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/virtury-cloud-launches-specialized-c...

The Montreal-based cloud infrastructure provider is now offering its ultra-low latency, DDoS-protected network with a multi-homed core network that is connected to PkIX (Pakistan Internet Exchange) for high performance and reliability.

"We are committed to providing the best cloud experience for our customers and are proud to announce the launch of our cloud services in Pakistan," said Muhammad Saddique, Virtury Cloud's CEO. "We are excited to provide our clients with a reliable and secure cloud environment for their applications and other business needs."

Virtury Cloud's services include Cloud VMs, virtual private servers (VPSs), managed hosting, dedicated servers, storage, backups, and disaster recovery, all of which are monitored 24/7.

The company says its new dedicated cloud services are the perfect solution for businesses looking for an affordable and reliable hosting solution without the need for expensive hardware or dedicated resources. The company's services are also compliant with Pakistani regulations and laws, providing an added layer of security and peace of mind to users.

"We are offering a powerful, secure, and cost-effective cloud environment," said Saddique.