On 25 May, a press
release said that the National
Informatics Centre of India
has set up a new state-of-the-art cloud-enabled
National
Data Centre (NDC) at Bhubaneswar, Odisha, India.
On 28 May, the centre is
inaugurated by the Union
Minister of Electronics and Information and Technology Mr Ravi Shankar Prasad
and supervised by the Union
Minister of Petroleum and Natural Gas and Skill Development and Entrepreneurship, Mr
Dharmendra Pradhan. The Data Centre, through the National
Informatics Centre, will offer around-the-clock services with secure hosting
applications of the Government and its departments through e-Governance.
The
National Informatics Centre (NIC) was established in 1976 to
develop and promote digital services and initiatives in the country. It has
played an important part in improving the
electronic services offered by the government, achieving wider transparency,
and promoting decentralised planning and management that has led to better
efficiency and accountability.
The National Informatics Centre
has already established three other National Data Centres in the country, in Delhi, Hyderabad
and Pune.
The upcoming centres at Bhubaneswar, through a number of government
departments, are expected to offer and
improve a variety of different electronic and digital services including Backup services, Web Hosting
services and Webcast
services, among others.
According to the official press
release, the National Informatics Centre plan
to use its cloud
services in Bhubaneswar to optimise the use and management of
information technologies and to ensure its services and products are reliable,
scalable and are provided with agility and elasticity. The cloud services will
provide benefits like access to Information Communication and Technology (ICT)
infrastructure and electronic services such as online training, consultancy,
e-learning, conferencing etc.
The Data Centre is designed to be as effective as possible which
will enable it to respond promptly to any infrastructure requirements. The
press release noted it also aims to accommodate future technology improvements,
distributed applications, database applications running on bare metal,
virtualised applications running in multi-hypervisor environments, and
cloud-based and other digital
applications that are easily available on demand.
The press release stated that the National Informatics Centre
has set up a centralised cloud environment to host various applications with a
simple user interface and increased application responsiveness to support the
new generation of distributed applications while accommodating existing
virtualised and non-virtualised environments.
Through a modular design with software-defined
ICT Infrastructure, the Data Centre will be able to facilitate providing
digital services over cloud more efficiently. Implementing the programme in
this way will also integrate it with the NIC
National Cloud Services, the press release added.
The release also said that the National Cloud Service Centre at
Bhubaneswar will provide on-demand access to ICT Infrastructure to ensure
availability and quick deployment of its applications. The platforms of
deployment to deliver the electronic services adhere to government policies and
enable easy sharing of information across applications. The Data Centre will
use a service-oriented approach to share ICT infrastructure. The initiative is
a cost-effective and service-based method to share digital resources.