New Delhi (ABC Live): Kapil Sibal, Minister of Communications and Information Technology, here today launched the National Cloud under ‘MeghRaj’ Initiative. The National Cloud is being implemented by NIC.
In order to utilise and harness the benefits of Cloud Computing, Government of India has embarked upon an ambitious initiative – ‘GI Cloud’ which has been named as ‘MeghRaj’. The focus of this initiative is to accelerate delivery of e-services in the country while optimizing ICT spending of the Government. This will ensure optimum utilization of the infrastructure and speed up the development and deployment of eGov applications. The architectural vision of GI Cloud encompasses a set of discrete cloud computing environments spread across multiple locations, built on existing or new (augmented) infrastructure, following a set of common protocols, guidelines and standards issued by the Government of India. Two Policy reports viz., ‘GI Cloud Strategic Direction Paper’ and ‘GI Cloud Adoption and Implementation Roadmap’ have been prepared by the Department of Electronics & Information Technology (DeitY). The reports are available at: http://deity.gov.in/content/gi-cloud-initiative-meghraj for download.
The National Cloud will help the departments to procure ICT services on demand in the OPEX model rather than investing upfront on the CAPEX. The Cloud Services available are Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), Software as a Service (SaaS) and Storage as a Service (STaaS). Some of the features of the National Cloud include self service portal, multiple Cloud solutions, secured VPN access and multi location Cloud. NIC is providing Cloud services under the umbrella of ‘MeghRaj’.
