To modernise the information technology (IT) infrastructure of government departments, the ministry of electronics and IT is preparing a model framework to enable them to access cloud-based services from empanelled service providers.
This comes at a time when the Indian networks are under threat with security breaches feared in its banking system.
Cloud service providers offer a system wherein data can be stored on a remote server and accessed from there for computing. This does away with the requirement to have on-premise servers and maintenance issues.
Currently, the government departments are dependent on data centres of the National Informatics Centre (NIC), under the IT ministry. As many as 250 government departments and entities avail the national cloud services from NIC data centres.
In September, the ministry empanelled 11 firms including Microsoft India Pvt. Ltd, Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd, Hewlett Packard Enterprise India Ltd, IBM India Pvt. Ltd, Tata Communications Ltd and Sify Technologies Ltd, among others, to offer cloud services for an initial period of two years.
The framework is being built to fast-track the process given the government’s thrust on offering various e-governance services to citizens through online platforms, as part of the National Democratic Alliance government’s Digital India programme.
The cloud-based services initiative is expected to enable government departments and ministries to move towards consumption-based billing—a pay-per-use model. It will also speed up the development of information and communications technology-enabled applications through shared virtualised cloud services and enable a self-service portal for provisioning of IT infrastructure resources, besides reducing implementation time.
By Baishakhi Dutta
