Million.id program is closed to foreign hosting

Ilustrasi (dok)

JAKARTA (IndoTelko) - The Ministry of Communications and Information Technology (Kemenkominfo) confirms that the Million .id domain program for Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) in Goes Digital event is closed to foreign hosting and data center.

"We do not use foreign hosting and data center for this program. If it is opened to foreigners, then it is useless to keep the internet traffic shifting overseas, We are already have imported too much bandwidth for Internet traffic that eventually went overseas," said the e-Business Director General of the Ministry of Communication and Information Technology Azhar Hashim, lately.

The International bandwidth traffic from Indonesia in 2015 was recorded at about 390 Gbps or equivalent to Rp3.2 trillion. As of March 2016, the import value of international bandwidth has been 1.5 Tbps or around Rp16 trillion. At the end of this year is estimated to reach 2 Tbps.

"This is caused by the unevenly distributed internet infrastructure, The Palapa Ring has not been completed, 4G is not evenly distributed throughout Indonesia. Just imagine if we do not start educating about a large increase in bandwidth to the domain or application owners? Because although they are small, but the number is big and generally hosting overseas," he said.

Hashim said that the era of cloud computing is to provide efficiency and savings for the application or website owners, but in reality the internet traffic fled overseas and Indonesia became one of the biggest bandwidth importers. "It's the future business, after everything is digitized, we could lose the oil business. If we are too depending on foreign hosting or data center, eventually all Indonesian data would be owned by foreigners," he said.

He added that, for the program, there are 14 million .id hosting providers listed in eKatalog Policy Institute for Procurement of goods and services (LKPP). "The hosting provider had been appointed at the end of 2015 by a joint team of LKPP and Communications and Information Technology. So, the rental hosting payments is no longer needed through an auction process," said Azhar.

According to initial plan, by 2016 there will be 350 thousand .id domain names to be released to SMEs in the Goes Digital event with targeting 20 provinces. "Currently we are focusing first on four provinces namely West Java, Central Java, Yogyakarta and East Java with 20 thousand domain names," he said.

Indonesia has about 57 million SMEs business operators, of which 50 million are engaged as fishermen and farmers. Only 7 million of them are in the trading business.

This Million .id domain program that at first glance is similar to Telkom’s SME's Kampung Goes Digital that already exist n 120 locations. Lastly, Telkom is collaborating with the Integrated Business Service Center-Cooperative, Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (PLUT-KUMKM) in order to maximize SME activities Goes Digital.(es)