Kuwait’s Defence Ministry has invited firms to bid by 11 August for a contract to rehabilitate and upgrade its data centre room.

The deal will bolster Kuwait’s security and surveillance apparatus, which is undergoing a rapid review and overhaul in the wake of the suicide bombing on 26 June at a mosque, which claimed 27 lives.

While Qatar and the UAE have put in place robust security and surveillance framework over the past few years, the same cannot be said of the rest of the GCC states, including Kuwait.

Qatar has one of the most stringent surveillance policies in the world, with compliance being overseen by the Security Services Department (SSD), a division within the Ministry of Interior (MoI). The law in Qatar has made it obligatory for all security surveillance systems to utilise an open standard based on an Internet Protocol (IP) network system and megapixels as minimum recommended camera resolution. Furthermore, the state requires surveillance systems to have sufficient storage for a period of 120 days in MPEG-4 or H.264 format. The standard video storage capacity, even in some developed countries, is 30 days.

Across the GCC states, critical national and industrial assets such as airports, seaports and oil and gas facilities are strictly monitored by agencies such as the aviation and port authorities, as well as dedicated agencies such as the Critical National Infrastructure Authority (CNIA) in Abu Dhabi and the High Commission on Industrial Security (HCIS) in Saudi Arabia.

However, there still exists a major gap across most of the GCC states in terms of a centralised security and surveillance infrastructure and framework that could monitor all sectors and all participants in the supply chain, such as equipment suppliers and systems integration companies, among others.

In addition to upgrading the Defence Ministry’s data centre, some of the most recent tenders coming out of Kuwait’s Central Tenders Committee over the past few days include tenders for protection and security services at Farwaniya and Jahra. Farwaniya is a suburb of Kuwait City, while Jahra lies some 32 kilometres west of the main city.