In recent times, Government of India has taken many steps to bring many Government services online. This is clearly evident from the fact that Government e-transactions have risen rapidly in 2013, growing 100 times more as compared to 2012.
Infact, according to eTaal site, in the month of January 2014 alone, over 500 million etransactions have been executed for various online govt services.
Now, to accelerate delivery of e-services further, Kapil Sibal, Minister of Comm and IT, today launched the National Cloud under ‘MeghRaj’ Initiative, which is being implemented by NIC (National Informatics Center).
The focus of MeghRaj initiative is to evolve a Strategy and implement various components including governance mechanism to ensure proliferation of Cloud in government. Formulation of the Cloud Policy is one of the primary steps that will facilitate large scale adoption of cloud by government.
According to press release, GI Cloud has set of discrete cloud computing environments spread across various geographies built on Government’s existing or new infrastructure. The GI cloud will adhere to common protocols, guidelines and standards issued by the Government.
Two policy reports – ‘GI Cloud Strategic Direction Paper’ and ‘GI Cloud Adoption and Implementation Roadmap’ – have also been prepared and released by Department of Electronics & Information Technology (DeitY).
Upon completion of the GI Cloud setup, it will be able to provide various cloud services to various state and government bodies. The services inlcude:
- Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS)
- Compute as a service
- Storage as a service
- Network as a service
- Disaster recovery as a service
- Backup as a service
- Virtual desktop solutions
- High availability services
- Infrastructure for application development and testing
- Platform-as-a-service (PaaS)
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- Platform for application, portal development and testing
- Platform for application or portal hosting
- Database as a service
- Collaboration platforms
- Software-as-a-service (SaaS)
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- Email as a service
- Productivity suites (as a service)
- ERP as a service
- CRM as a service GI Cloud (Meghraj) Adoption and Implement
- BI and analytics as a service
- Collaboration as a service
- Identity and assess management (IAM) as a service
- Security as a service
- Common central services like payment gateway, mobile gateway, PKI, etc as a service
Along with these components, the GI cloud will also have its own eGov AppStore that will house various web as well as mobile apps, which various departments can download and utilize. The apps will be easily customisable and configurable for reuse by various government agencies or departments at the central and state levels without investing effort in the development of such applications.
Our View
This is a very ambitious plan by Government to say the least. Even if they are partially successful in implementing this, it will go a long way in improving governance in India.
Most importantly, being on a private GI Cloud and not on internet, security issues will not be there to a large extent as it will not be exposed to the world.
We will need to wait and watch as to what extent they are successful.
What is your take?
