Expression of Interest For Data Hosting And Cloud Market Assessment

Expression of Interest are invited for Data Hosting and Cloud Market Assessment in South Caucasus. Publication Date: 05/14/2025 12:00 AM EDT EOI Deadline: 06/02/2025 11:59 PM EDT The objective of the Consultancy service is to assess the supply and demand of the data infrastructure and cloud services market in the three South Caucasus countries at present and with a 10-year projection in the future, and identify pathways to attract private sector investment in such infrastructure, to expand digital markets in all three countries and serv the public sectors expected data storage needs and digitalization plans. All three South Caucasus countries also view the opportunity for the region to be positioned as an important node on inter-regional digital connectivity networks between Europe and Central Asia, and Europe and the Middle East. With increased international connectivity and access to hubs in Europe and Asia, the market for data hosting and cloud services also expands. This also opens an opportunity for serving as a data infrastructure hub in the region to serve data hosting and cloud requirements of neighboring countries in the Middle East and Central Asia, while also providing backup and redundancy within the South Caucasus region and for markets in Europe. This assignment includes assessing the demand for data hosting and cloud services at a national level, regional level (Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia), and for the region to serve neighboring markets. The demand and supply side enablers (e.g. policy and regulatory framework, strategy, skills) and barriers in the three countries of the South Caucasus will also be assessed and recommendations for attracting private investment into data hosting infrastructure, including examples of successful PPP arrangements and government policy provided. The results of the assessment should answer the larger question of how to make the region and countries favorable for private investment and concrete actions that need to be carried out by different stakeholders to attract and enable the productive presence of private sector cloud providers in the South Caucasus region. A key aspect of this approach that the study should articulate is to leverage public sector demand in the region as the anchor tenant to attract private capital and build a business case for the private players in the data and cloud market. The consultancy should provide a roadmap for the public sector to transition from their existing data storage models (on-premises, fragmented legacy solutions, owned and operated by the governments) towards hybrid models that leverage Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), and moving to Platform as a Service (PaaS), and potentially Software as a Service models (SaaS). The study will include a high-level legal and regulatory diagnostic to provide recommendations to enable the development of a cloud industry, covering aspects such as data protection, non-personal data related regulations, cybersecurity, data classification and cross-border data flows. Tender Link : https://wbgeprocure-rfxnow.worldbank.org/rfxnow/public/advertisement/5286/view.html

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