The Maharashtra government has empanelled five service providers to store about 1.25 lakh documents and files produced every day by various State departments for the next three years. The move comes six months after it unveiled a cloud policy with the idea of giving the public access to State data. The Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) include Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, Net Magic, Control-S and ESDS.
Currently, State data is being stored on 75 centralised data centres, resulting in a high maintenance cost. But putting the data on a public cloud will not only save hundreds of crores but will also create a $2-billion business opportunity for the data industry. “The CSPs have been empanelled by the Department of Information Technology for three years to provide cloud services to all government departments, subordinate offices, public sector undertakings, urban and rural local bodies till 2021,” said an official of the State Information Technology Department.
The CSPs will provide the government with a fully-managed data warehouse to make it simple and cost-effective to analyse data using standard SQL and Business Intelligence tools. The providers will also offer services that “will allow us to run complex analytic queries and massively parallel query executions, helping us analyse and present data to the public in a better way,” said an official.
In January this year, Maharashtra had unveiled a public cloud policy, virtually mandating its departments to shift their data storage on to the cloud, intending to make them available for free to the public. A four-member committee under the secretary of the Information Technology Department was formed by the CM to oversee the implementation of the policy. “Once the policy is implemented and the data stored on the cloud, the access to the public cloud services will either be free or on a pay-per-use model,” S.V.R. Srinivas, principal secretary, Information Technology Department, had said, when unveiling the policy.
The policy is compliant with the Union government’s National Data Sharing and Accessibility Policy, 2012, which mandates facilitation of access to government-owned shareable data in human readable and machine readable forms. The objective is to use public cloud in cases wherever the Right to Information Act is applicable, and then go in for enhanced security features for private and sensitive data, which will also be stored on the cloud, officials said.
