In order to maintain and improve the cloud services provided by the government’s National Informatics Centre (NIC), Jio Platforms has won a contract worth Rs 350 crore, sources informed ET.
The company from the Reliance Industries Group has been chosen to improve the NIC’s national cloud services and will be installed at the National Data Centres in Delhi, Pune, and Bhubaneswar. The technological backbone of the government is NIC. Five years of onsite maintenance are covered per Jio’s contract.
A source from Jio informed ET that “Jio has won the tender and has begun working on it.” “We are starting with overseeing their cloud services in Hyderabad and Bhubaneswar. For the management of NIC cloud solutions under Meghraj 2.0, NIC Services Inc. (NICSI) had requested proposals from Indian cloud partners.
To improve NIC’s national cloud infrastructure and enable its multi-cloud services, the source stated, “They sought a system integrator.”
As people’s expectations for online services have risen and the government continues to roll out eGovernance projects, according to NICSI, data center requirements are increasing rapidly. In order to achieve high availability, rapid scalability, effective management, and optimal resource use, strategic infrastructure must be put up.
As a result, NIC/NICSI has established national data centers in Delhi, Pune, Bhubaneswar, and Hyderabad as well as 30 smaller data centers in state capitals to serve the government at all levels.
The data centres are designed to offer a comprehensive range of hosting services, from colocation and bandwidth to physical hosting, shared hosting, dedicated servers with managed hosting options, and disaster recovery.
Jio will offer safe cloud services to government users as well as set up a multi-cloud orchestrator (unified cloud management platform). In order to improve the NIC National Cloud by commissioning, configuring, and integrating various ICT components, it is also necessary to establish and provide a cloud application marketplace.
ICT components are anticipated to grow by 30–40% annually. When and if these devices become available, Jio will integrate and set up the cloud service for all of them. For a further five years, it will maintain and run the cloud service.
The decision-making process for the selection coincides with the government’s evaluation of proposals for managing the national government cloud, which will let local cloud providers compete more effectively with global hyperscalers. These data centers house a large number of vital websites and apps for state and federal government agencies. The Meghraj Cloud now hosts the NIC National Cloud in the national data centers located in Delhi, Hyderabad, Pune, and Bhubaneswar.
Meghraj, a government effort, offers a variety of services, including IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS, which may be used to host websites, portals, online applications, and mobile applications. Virtual servers, Kubernetes containers, DevOps, and hosting support for all kinds of applications are all available with NIC Cloud Service.
Users of the cloud can put up a disaster recovery plan and access the services from many locations thanks to this. Government agencies have recently started utilising cloud computing and hosting their ICT applications there.
