Page 48 - PR COMMUNICATION AGE July - December 2020

capacity. To monitor the performance of SWANs, the agencies/ stakeholders, including various issues/concerns to
Ministry has mandated positioning of Third Party Auditors be addressed while planning, implementation operations
(TPAs) in the States/UTs. Till 31st December 2019, 29 States and maintenance of the Data Centres have been
have empanelled the TPAs for monitoring the performance formulated. Guidelines are updated from time to time and
of the SWAN in the respective States/UTs. are communicated to the States/UTs, leading to creation
of consistent and state of art infrastructure.
State Data Centre (SDC)
Achievements
State Data Centre (SDC) is one of the three core
• In FY 2019-20, Uttarakhand SDC became operational
infrastructure components under the NeGP. Under the SDC
scheme, Data Centres to be established in all the States/ and Assam SDC is under implementation.
UTs to consolidate services, applications and infrastructure • 3 State Data Centres (Mizoram, Nagaland, A&N) would
in order to provide efficient electronic delivery of be completing 5 years of operations during the year
Government to Government (G2G), Government to Citizen 2019-20.
(G2C) and Government to Business (G2B) services. These
services can be rendered by the States through common GI Cloud (MeghRaj)
service delivery platforms seamlessly supported by core In order to realize the Digital India vision, and to utilize and
connectivity infrastructure, such as, SWAN and CSCs as the harness the benefits of Cloud Computing, the Government
front-end delivery outlets at the village level. Some of the of India has embarked upon an ambitious initiative – “GI
key functionalities that can be provided through SDC are Cloud”, which has been named as ‘MeghRaj’. MeghRaj
central repository for the State, secure data storage, online initiative is intended to deliver ICT services over cloud to
delivery of services, citizen information/services portal, all the Departments/Ministries at the Centre and States/
State Intranet Portal, disaster recovery, remote UTs. The vision of this initiative is to accelerate delivery of
management and service integration, etc. SDCs also provide e-Services in the country, while optimizing ICT spending of
better operation and management control with minimized the Government. As per the MeghRaj policy, “Government
overall cost of data management, IT resource departments at the Centre and States to first evaluate the
management, deployment and other costs for States/UTs. option of using the GI Cloud for implementation of all new
projects funded by the Government. Existing applications,
As on 31st Dec 2019, 29 SDCs have been declared services and projects are being included to assess whether
operational in Tamil Nadu, Puducherry, West Bengal, they should migrate to the GI Cloud”.
Andhra Pradesh, Meghalaya, Goa, Karnataka, Manipur,
Odisha, Sikkim, Haryana, Kerala, Maharashtra, Gujarat, Some of the major benefits of GI Cloud are listed
Tripura, Rajasthan, Nagaland, Uttar Pradesh, Andaman and below:
Nicobar Islands, Madhya Pradesh, Lakshadweep, • Driving cost efficiencies with increased utilization of IT
Chhattisgarh, Jammu and Kashmir, Mizoram, Bihar, Infrastructure resources through cloud.
Himachal Pradesh, Jharkhand, Punjab, Uttarakhand.
• Enable conversion of CAPEX to OPEX paving the way
Out of the 3 pending SDCs (yet to be operational) Assam for consumption based billing and faster procurement
has been selected as Data Centre Operator (DCO) and all of IT Infrastructure services.
Centres have started installation. Since the SDCs are • Rapid development, deployment and re-use of ICT
expected to host critical Government applications/services applications.
including important citizen data, protection of the same is • On demand scalability of infrastructure to meet the
of prime importance. In this regard, the SDC scheme has
long-term capacity requirements and elasticity to cater
provisioned for a Disaster Recovery (DR) mechanism through
storage based replication, as part of the SDC enhancement. to the peak load requirements. The major components
17 States have been DR enabled. of MeghRaj include:
o Setting up of State and National Clouds
MeitY is providing continuous support and guidance to the o Setting up of an e-Gov Appstore
States/UTs in order to ensure smooth implementation of the o Empanelment of Cloud Service Providers
project across the country.
o Empanelment of Cloud Auditors
Policy guidelines, roles and responsibilities of different o Setting up of Cloud Management Office (Policies,

48 PR COMMUNICATION AGE July - December 2020