Jio Platforms gets Rs 350 crore deal to run NIC's cloud services for 5 yrs

The Jio Platforms has secured a Rs 350-crore contract to manage and improve the cloud services of Centre's National Informatics Centre (NIC) for five years for onsite maintenance, according to the Economic Times. 

NIC, which falls under the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), is the government of India's technology partner. Established in 1976, NIC's objective is to provide technology-driven solutions to Central and State Governments

Jio has been selected to enhance NIC's national cloud services and will be deployed at the National Data Centre in Delhi, Pune and Bhubaneswar, according to the report.

Reliance's Jio won the tender and has already begun managing NIC's cloud services in Bhubaneswar and Hyderabad, the report added.

The tender had raised requests for proposals from Indian cloud partners for managing NIC cloud solutions under Meghraj 2.0.

NIC was looking for a system integrator to enhance national cloud infrastructure and enable multi-cloud services.

As the demand for online services has increased, the government is launching more eGovernance projects. This has significantly increased the requirements for efficient data centres and strategic infrastructure.

Keeping this in mind the NIC is seeking to establish national data centres in Delhi, Pune, Bhubaneswar and Hyderabad, and 30 small data centres in state capitals.

The services included in the data centre will provide hosting services like physical hosting, shared hosting, and dedicated servers with managed hosting solutions to the government. They will also provide infrastructure services like collocation and bandwidth, and disaster recovery, the report said. 

As a part of its services, Jio will also configure a unified cloud management platform and provide secure cloud services to government users. A cloud application marketplace to improve the NIC National Cloud will also be developed by Jio.

Reliance's Jio will also operate and maintain the cloud service for a period of five years.

At present, the national data centres in Delhi, Hyderabad, Pune and Bhubaneswar are dedicated to host NIC National Cloud under the umbrella of Meghraj Cloud.

Meghraj is the Centre's initiative to provide a wide range of services, including IaaS, PaaS and SaaS, which can be used to host websites, portals, web and mobile applications.