Cloud in e-governance: Why India's adoption is low

BANGALORE, INDIA: According to a Frost & Sullivan report, there has been limited adoption of cloud computing even at the state level due to security and privacy concerns

Let's not be critical about it. We have seen the government rapidly pushing its e-governance initiatives like the UID project, State Wide Area Networks (SWANs), State Data Centres (SDCs), National Service Delivery Gateway (NSDGs), State Service Delivery Gateways (SSDGs) or Common Service Centres (CSCs).

While it is good that the government is transforming itself in terms of delivering various government services to its citizens, it is also important to analyse whether these changes are being initiated at the right time.

In February 2013, the department of electronics and IT (DeitY) revealed its plans to roll out the National Cloud initiative and termed it as the ‘GI Cloud'. To implement this initiative, the government set up a task force to give necessary directions with respect to various activities, including creation of a detailed plan on the cloud strategy, cloud architecture, cloud implementation plan and roadmap.

In order to address the strategy aspects of the initiative, DeitY had come up with a roadmap titled- ‘GI Cloud-Strategic Direction Paper'. In this document, the government assessed the current government ICT infrastructure. The document reads, along with the infrastructure that is being built as part of the NeGP (infrastructure like the SWANs, SDCs, NSDGs, SSDGs and CSCs), other initiatives like National Data Centres (NDCs) by NIC, National Knowledge Network (NKN) and National Optical Fibre Network (NOFN) are also in progress.

Going by a Frost & Sullivan report released in 2011 (a time when the Indian government was assessing the pros and cons of deploying Cloud in Public Sector), due to security and privacy concerns there has been limited adoption of cloud computing even at the state level. It seems the government was sceptical about letting go of control of their critical data to third party service providers.

"The Jammu and Kashmir Government was the first to adopt cloud computing for its eGovernance services for which it had deployed Microsoft's solutions. Despite low adoption levels, there is significant interest among agencies and the Department of IT in India to promote cloud computing across the country," reads the report.

Government agencies looked forward to adopt private cloud to reduce costs and enhance efficiency. While most of the countries like US, UK, Japan, Australia and Singapore are making rapid strides in the adoption of cloud in their government space, the adoption rate in India has still been low.

However, industry experts are quite positive about the future benefits of GI Cloud. Sunil Chavan, Director - Software & Cloud, Asia Pac at Hitachi Data Systems, says, "GI Cloud roadmap is based on National Institute of Standards & Technology (NIST) cloud ecosystem framework. NIST is the key agency which defined the government cloud initiatives in US. GI Cloud roadmap will take various eGovernance initiative into consideration. GI cloud will help create infrastructure across states and at national level on cost effective basis for the government. This should expedite eGovernance projects for all necessary stakeholders - government, citizens and industry."

Planned Architecture for GI Cloud:

The Task Force set up by the government has tried to explain the Architecture Vision of the GI Cloud in its report titled "GI Cloud Adoption and Implementation Roadmap". The architectural vision of GI Cloud centres follow a set of protocols, guidelines and standards issued by the Government of India.

As per the planned architecture, the Government Cloud Architecture would reveal multiple private cloud computing environments at the state and national levels. The Task Force has also said in the report, "there would neither be a single implementation service provider nor a single technology vendor. If the right steps are taken to align government ICT procurement practices with the cloud computing vision and architecture, healthy competition can exist. At the same time platform standardisation makes development and maintenance of cloud-based applications faster and more cost effective than current methods permit."

This could evade the chances of technology or vendor lockin since multiple vendors can compete for a given element of the platform, believes DeitY. The plan also includes a layer of support services enabling multiple stakeholders to participate and share costs. The support layer will also include a help desk to provide timely and consistent help to all stakeholders and to serve as a focal point for capturing and disseminating best cloud practices and ensure adherence to government defined guidelines and standards for GI Cloud. Through a dashboard, one can get real-time visibility into operational status and metrics across all participants in the cloud, enabling quick issue resolution and informing effective decision-making about future evolution.

Initially, one National Cloud will be set up and after assessing the demand, other clouds at the national level may be set up later. Services provided by National Clouds could include infrastructure (compute, storage and network), platform, backup and recovery, infrastructure scaling of the State Clouds, application development, migration, hosting etc.

Cloud Computing initiatives in other governments:

Before the GI Cloud initiative was launched in India, many countries had amicably adopted cloud for ensuring better governance. The Texas Department of Information Resources (TDIR) had recently deployed email and collaboration services using Microsoft Office 365. After this deployment, 100,000 government employees could access cloud-based email and collaboration tools, including web conferencing, document sharing and real-time collaboration, and calendar sharing.

For implementing the $3.7 billion Priority School Building Programme (PSBP) in the UK, The Education Funding Agency (EFA) under the country's department of education is using a cloud-based collaboration software. In order to support its students and researchers, the Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (JAIST) has upgraded its private cloud environment.

To improve the delivery of government services, The Government of the State of New South Wales (NSW), Australia, will launch five pilot projects to test cloud-based IT solutions. Singapore's National University is also using cloud computing for remote processing and storing of data for its research programme on wireless Body Sensor Network for Disease Management and Prevention-Oriented Healthcare.

Apart from these countries, Thailand, Hong Kong and Myanmar too have embraced cloud for ensuring better governance. The Indian government has taken this initiative at a time, when most of the other e-Governance initiatives are yet to be completed and cloud computing is still tested by many private enterprises. In addition to that, the implementation agencies and the Task Force appointed by the Government have to ensure that the GI Cloud is implemented in a way that conforms to the existing infrastructure.