Cloud-based solutions an opportunity and challenge for government projects

With more and more government services getting digitized several government projects have been leveraging cloud infrastructure but the ride so far has not been smooth, say government officials.

Abhishek Singh, IAS, NEGD while speaking at a session at the 30th Nasscom Technology and Leadership Forum 2022 said that there is a need for a central body that can reduce the procurement issues of a cloud infrastructure.

“Many departments may not have the wherewithal to manage the entire cloud procurement process. Instead of that NIC (National Informatics Centre) or any other entity can have an arrangement with the cloud services provider and then procure services and offer them as managed services,” said Singh.

He was also of the opinion that there is still a lot of unawareness related to cloud and its use which makes people within the government departments to not adopt cloud. “There is lack of risk appetite among people and departments and many still do not understand what cloud is and then the easy option is to rely on our home grown services provided NIC, but the value that comes from a managed services provider of cloud, which is a full blown cloud provider that include compute, infrastructure and services, that gets missed out,” added Singh.

There is also a need for departments to educate the members about cloud and usage and procurement as the financial contours are different. “I have seen that many times public sector entities or departments lack the capacity to estimate how much compute power they require, or storage, or bandwidth is required…which again means that the bid is not structured properly,” he added.

Moreover, cloud infrastructure is about pay-per-use and that is a challenge too. “There have been projects which had projected an ex amount as budget for procuring cloud services, but since the actual usage was not much the expenditure was less. But then the internal finance team asks us why we asked for such a big budget? Or then can be an opposite situation as well,” he explained.

A case in example was when MyGov launched a chatbot for Whatsapp and within a small time almost 80 million users adopted it.

But that has not stopped several government departments from adopting cloud and as cloud becomes central security is also becoming crucial. For instance, the Indian Railways RailTel is setting up 100 small data centres across tier 2 & 3 cities. Chandra Kishore Prasad, of IRISET during the panel discussion said that one of the reasons to set up smaller data centres was also because the compute power has increased and much more can be done with less number of servers.

Prasad added that when it comes to mission critical data they are making sure that all measures are taken to guard against cyber-attacks. “We follow a 3-2-1 policy where we take three backups of the database. While two backups are on different systems and out of which one is offline. Along with this to avoid ransomware attacks we have created an immutable copy. Moreover, mission critical databases are always distributed across various data centres to avoid any eventuality,” said Prasad.  

Akhilesh Srivastava, project head road safety2.0- WEF initiative believes that cloud is the only option especially when projects of massive scale are taken up. “Take for instance fastTag, nearly 7 million transactions are taking place everyday. The collection is almost Rs 110 crore on a daily basis. Such a large scale is only possible with cloud. We are also now going to implement a similar cloud-based infrastructure solution for road safety 2.0 project,” he added.