India govt. knocks at cloud to host critical data

NEW DELHI, INDIA: Unlike India's enterprise segment that is torn between the benefits and concerns of cloud services and cites reasons such as security, uptime and availability of data, for not moving on to a cloud platform, the country's government is set to show the way forward.

A report on The Economic Times says that department of information technology is planning to set-up a national cloud based network that connects all state data centres (SDC) which would make that the backbone of national e-governance plan.

SDCs are conceptualized with the objective of providing a common enabling infrastructure to the states to cater to their e-governance applications hosting requirements of the entire state governments and its departments.

"A Cloud based Service Delivery Model in each State Data Centres (SDC) will enable the SDC IT Infrastructure to be shared amongst multiple departments. Thus making the SDC as a Private Cloud operated for State and to be managed by a third party," says a draft tender put out by the Department of IT in July.

Out of the 28 SDCs, 16 are already operational and the rest is expected to be operational by end of 2012. These SDCs have been equipped with infrastructure which will enable State /UT departments with seamless, highly reliable/robust, shared and secured infrastructure with scalable capacity.

According to the draft:

The SDCs will be avail common infrastructure, which broadly includes:

i. Compute Infrastructure: consisting of web, application and database servers with different flavors of OS & database software’s has been provisioned in the SDC.

ii. Storage Infrastructure: Centralized storage with flexible and secure configuration shall be available in the SDC including backup facilities. The same shall be leveraged by different line departments for their data storage requirements in shared manner. Currently, the states have adequately provisioned for 5 years storage requirement.

iii. Network and Security Infrastructure: Core network infrastructure that is a requirement of every Data Centre

The Department of IT has invited proposals from IT companies like HP, IBM, Cisco and Dell to set up and maintain private clouds in each state. The move may cost the Centre less than Rs 100 crore, and will help the exchequer prevent wastage of money on duplication of resources, adds the report.