Maha govt selects VMware for its MahaGov Cloud infrastructure project

Virtualisation and cloud computing to play a critical role in enabling the vision for e-governance in Maharashtra

Government of Maharashtra has selected VMware, virtualization and cloud infrastructure  provider company for its MahaGov Cloud. It is an initiative by the Directorate of Information Technology (DIT) and Government of Maharashtra to provide Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a service (PaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS) to various state departments for their e-governance initiatives.

The Government of Maharashtra has deployed VMware vSphere and VMware vCloud Director to virtualize the state data center, which hosts the MahaGov Cloud.

Commenting on this, Rajesh Aggarwal, IT Secretary, Government of Maharashtra, said, "Virtualization and cloud computing would play a critical role in enabling our vision for e-governance in the state of Maharashtra and have partnered with VMware to help us on our cloud journey and fulfill this vision. State departments hosting their applications on the MahaGov Cloud will allow for better management of the state's IT infrastructure, while also bringing about transparency, efficiencies and lowering costs.

The VMware deployment has helped the Government of Maharashtra lower the cost of hosting, improve the management of the state data center infrastructure, and drastically reduce the time required to provision infrastructure for various state departments."

He added, "This has encouraged state departments to host their mission critical applications on the MahaGov Cloud, making it the only government cloud in India that is running a production environment with a high volume of servers and applications."

However, finacial details of the venture have not been disclosed by VMware.

The Directorate of Information Technology (DIT) has conducted a number of user awareness programmes and has laid down guidelines for state departments to confidently host their applications on the MahaGov Cloud.

It has also published a rate card for these cloud services that any government department or public sector undertaking can avail at a nominal cost. "With limited budgets and a growing need for services, state government's IT Departments need a more flexible and cost-effective model for computing - one that allows them to operate more efficiently and respond faster to emerging needs. Our cloud solutions are helping governments transform their IT departments into efficient, flexible enterprises that can respond faster to emerging needs, while reducing IT infrastructure and operating costs. Virtualization provides organizations with an evolutionary path to cloud computing that preserves existing IT investments, security, and control. " said T Srinivasan, managing director, VMware India & SAARC.