National Informatics Centre (NIC), which provides technology support for governance services, plans to hire 800 professionals in one year across India, including 355 cybersecurity experts "to tackle cyber risks", a top NIC official said.
NIC today also opened its new cloud-enabled 'National Data Centre', inaugurated by IT Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad here.
"This data centre in Bhubaneswar is of global standards... We don't discriminate, we don't see development through political colour," Prasad said at a conference here.
NIC provides technology support to governance services and hosts nearly 10,000 websites of the government. The Bhubaneswar centre is NIC's fourth 'National Data Centre' after Delhi, Hyderabad and Pune.
It is spread over 40,000 square feet and will host new as well as existing applications of central and state governments with an ability to support 35,000 virtual servers.
Emphasising the significance of the new national data centre here, Prasad further said that in the IT ecosystem, data centre adds to the "digital clout" of a state or location and raises its global profile.
"Data centre is important because data sanctity is important," Prasad said.
The new data centre aims to offer round-the-clock operations with secure hosting for e-governance applications of various ministries and departments.
"With a slew of government apps including MyGov, e-way bill, public finance management system, eHospitals all being hosted by NIC, the demand for computing and storage has increased many folds," Neeta Verma, director general of NIC told reporters here.
She said that over the next one year, NIC will hire 800 people all over India and 355 of these will be cybersecurity professionals, to tackle "rising risks of cybersecurity".
The hiring will be at both entry and lateral levels, that is, from the industry.
NIC currently has 4,500 people across India in its various operations across the country.
Outlining technology prowess of India, Prasad said there are 121 crore mobile phones and Aadhaar, 45 crore smartphones and that JanDhan-Aadhaar-mobile trinity (JAM trinity) had let to massive savings of Rs 90,000 crore and increased convenience for people.
Stating Common Service Centre had enabled digital delivery of services to rural and remote locations, the Minister said as many as 16,000 CSCs are active in the state of Odisha.
"We are open to supporting state government...I would request Odisha government.. to be proactive in this. I will do my work but you will also have to come to Delhi, meet mobile phone companies and offer incentives," Prasad said.
Minister for Skill Development and Entrepreneurship Dharmendra Pradhan was also present on the occasion.
An NIC release said that NIC data centre's unified and shared infrastructure is flexible enough to rapidly respond to infrastructure requirements and also accommodate future technology enhancements, distributed applications, database applications, virtualised applications and cloud-based applications that are available on demand.
The cloud services will provide benefits like on-demand access to ICT (Information and Communication Technology) infrastructure for easy availability and quick deployment of applications and standardised platforms of deployment, it added.
The cloud service offerings of NIC would allow departments to provision infrastructure and add to the computing capacity "on demand".
In the traditional model, Departments have to budget and procure infrastructure at the commencement of the project, leading to either over-provisioning of infrastructure or under-sizing of the requirements.
But elastic nature of the cloud allows departments not only to bring the solution to deployment quickly but also to scale up based on the demand of peak or low loads.
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