A new order keeps the government's secret files in the Philippines. PLDT says it's ready.
Executive Order 119 requires anything the government labels top secret or secret to be stored inside the country. Until now, about 90 percent of government data has been sitting overseas, mostly in Singapore.
President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. signed Executive Order 119 on July 13. It updates how the government sorts its own files and adds one hard rule: anything stamped top secret or secret has to be stored inside the Philippines. Less sensitive files can still sit on cloud services, meaning computers rented from another company, but with new safeguards attached.
The reason is a number that has been quietly true for years. About 90 percent of government data has been hosted abroad, mostly in Singapore, at an estimated 12 billion pesos a year, figures reported by InsiderPH from congressional budget hearings. So the files that agencies keep about roads, taxes, cases and people have largely been living in someone else's country.
Why it matters
Where a file physically sits decides whose laws reach it. A record stored in Singapore answers to Singapore's courts and Singapore's police powers first, not ours. For a normal Filipino, that is the difference between your government being able to demand its own records back and having to ask another government nicely. The 12 billion pesos a year is the second point: that is rent, paid out, every year.
The two big telcos moved within days. PLDT pointed at VITRO Sta. Rosa, which it calls the country's first AI-ready data center, and said it had roughly 34 megawatts of space and power ready for servers as of April 15. Globe general counsel Froilan Castelo called the order a significant milestone, and Globe president Carl Cruz said digital transformation only works when people trust that government systems are secure.
We're eager to help turn the President's vision into reality. We have been preparing for this future for years.
The catch to watch
An order is not a finished move. Shifting decades of records home takes budget, staff and time that agencies have to be given, and nothing in the order says when it must be done. Local is also not automatically safer: a poorly run data center in Laguna leaks the same way one in Singapore does, and the order tells agencies where to put files, not how well to guard them. Worth noting too that the loudest cheering comes from the companies that will sell the space. PLDT is listing VITRO REIT in October, a property fund built on eight data centers with about 24 megawatts of capacity, roughly 30 percent of it still unsold.