The modern world without IT technologies is unimaginable, and its development as well. The global turmoil of recent years, respectively, and the threat of hybrid wars, are sounding the alarm and talking about the need for each country to create its own “safe IT field”. Here, of course, the digitalization of all activities familiar to us, from service industries to tourism and shopping, also plays a special role.

How Azerbaijan intends to develop its IT sphere, how the state and the private sector can interact in this area.

First of all, it should be noted that President of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev has signed a decree on October 11 last year, on some measures to improve management in the field of digitalization, innovation, high technology and communications.

It says that the state in this matter "keeps its finger on the pulse", there is an understanding of not only all the privileges of the IT sector, but also its challenges in terms of the country's security.

Today in Azerbaijan there are state programs that aim at the development of the information society. And this makes it necessary to use information technology much more widely than it is at the moment, he noted.

Speaking about the potential of the country, it is worth noting the fact that DATA centers that meet the requirements of the Uptime Institute TIER III operate in Baku and Yevlakh, and even the cache servers of the social network Facebook, the Google search engine are located here, content delivery to neighboring countries - Georgia, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan.

Moreover, Azerbaijan has its own satellite and its operator – “Azerkosmos”, which is so far the first and only one of its kind in the South Caucasus. 90% of the sales volume of the satellite operator “Azerkosmos” was formed by providing export services to foreign countries. And according to the results of ten months of 2020, “Azerkosmos” provided services to 30 countries of the world.

In the near future, the Azerbaijan Digital Hub program, implemented by the backbone Internet provider AzerTelecom, can also contribute to the formation of the digital market. The implementation of the Azerbaijan Digital Hub program provides for the construction of a backbone infrastructure within the country and abroad, the transformation of Baku into an Internet traffic exchange point (IXP), and the construction of a large regional DATA center.

In addition, many events related to IT technologies are held in Azerbaijan. In particular, on December 1-3, 2022, the largest in the Caspian and Caucasus regions, the 26th Azerbaijan International Telecommunications and Information Technologies Exhibition and Conference - Bakutel 2022, will be held in the capital of Azerbaijan, Baku.

Analytic group of News.Az

The article focuses on ICT development in Azerbaijan. 

The article was published with the support of the Media Development Agency of the Republic of Azerbaijan (MEDIA).