Young entrepreneurs, looking forward to start their software firms, may soon find it easier to do so, once the State Information Technology department’s plan for a mega cloud-enabled State Data Centre fructifies.
The proposed Centre will provide them a platform for testing software or mobile applications. “We are contemplating extending the services of the facility to engineering students too for their requirements,” an official said, adding that ICT Academy, a not-for-profit autonomous organisation, may be roped in for this purpose.
Though nothing has yet been finalised, different models are being studied to make available the Data Centre for larger public interests, the official says.
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To cite an illustration of the benefits of the State Data Centre, school students of 10{+t}{+h}or 12{+t}{+h}Standard of the State stream, while trying to know their results, may not have to be anxious about the possibility of the crash of servers of the website of the examination authorities.
The website of the Directorate of Government Examination also witnesses peak traffic when the students download either applications for the examinations or hall tickets. But, the peak traffic occurs only at the time of examinations. Even though the department’s server remains idle in the remaining period of year, the authorities have to plan a capacity that can take care of the peak traffic. By having the cloud-enabled system in place, this issue can be effectively addressed, explains the official.
Apart from serving the purpose of better and optimal utilisation of the computer infrastructure, the proposed Data Centre will ensure enhanced quality of delivery of public services of various departments and agencies. The idea is to pool resources of all the departments so that the capacity can be scaled up very fast for better public service. In the process, the cost of expenditure towards procurement of hardware, software and maintenance by individual department will get “reduced drastically.”
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In seven months, the Centre will be ready, says the official. Even now, with the help of the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), a Central government body, a cloud system has already been set up. The total cost of the project is around Rs. 11.4 crore, of which the Union government’s assistance will be Rs. 1.5 crore.