At a time, when private enterprises are only testing the waters around cloud computing, the central government has made a bold decision to migrate critical information infrastructure on the cloud. The department of information technology is planning to set up a national cloud-based network that connects all state data centres, which would make that the backbone of national e-governance plan, which when completed would deliver many government-to-citizen and government business services via the internet. In effect, each of the 28 states and 7 Union territories will have a private cloud of their own.

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 on duplication of resources. State data centres, built at a cost of Rs 4-5 crore each, are operational in about 16 states. UP, Punjab, Assam, Mizoram, Jharkhand, Chattisgarh are laggards , even as states in the south have fully-functional data centres.

Source: Times of India