Brazil’s Salvador invests in fiber ring, private cloud

Salvador city, capital of northeast Brazil’s Bahia state, invested 112mn reais (US$20.2mn) in the deployment of a metropolitan fiber ring and in a ‘private cloud’ to centralize all its data.

Both projects fall under Salvador's smart city technologies master plan (PDTCI).

With 915km of optical fiber, Infovia Salvador will connect approximately 1,000 public buildings to high-speed internet and offer free Wi-Fi to surrounding areas, the city hall said in a release.

The project received 87mn reais in investments, the bulk of which came from development bank CAF.

The network is already completed and expected to generate savings for public coffers. 

Salvador incurred an annual cost of 25mn reais to buy equipment to enable internet in public agencies, said mayor Bruno Reis, without detailing which equipment.

“We invested 87mn reais to save 25mn reais per year and have an internet with much greater capacity, offering better quality services,” Reis said.

The network has 48 fiber pairs, but only 10 are being used by the city. 

Salvador plans to tender the idle ones to private companies, which would rent them from the municipal government.

DATACENTER

Costs, in addition to security, also led the city's administration to centralize data into a private cloud.

It is not clear whether this private cloud will be entirely on-premise and fully managed by the city itself or whether it will be installed in a third-party structure in a colocation or hosting model.

“The city used to have everything saved in the cloud at a cost of 2mn reais per year. There was a lack of security, we were constantly attacked by hackers, the system crashed,” said the mayor.

“So we decided to have our own cloud and invested 25mn reais. We are migrating all data to a single cloud and deactivating the mini datacenters of each department and each agency. This also represents savings in public resources.”

The fiber and the cloud announcements were made during an event that marked the beginning of works on the city's new operations and control center. 

The mayor, who is seeking a second term in the October elections, also announced a project for a local tech hub to be located in a low-income neighborhood.