After putting in place the necessary infrastructure to shift the State wide area network (SWAN) and Secretariat campus network (SCAN) to the new secretariat premises — Burgula Ramakrishna Rao Bhavan — the Information Technology Department has now focused on bringing all the online applications under one roof.
Though a major chunk of applications have already been brought under the purview of the State Data Centre, online services pertaining to the Panchayat Raj and Rural Development, Commercial Taxes and few other departments are yet to come on to the platform. These services are presently being offered through the online services platform created and maintained by the Tata Consultancy Services.
Senior officials of the department held discussions with a team of TCS professionals on the steps that should be taken to integrate these services with the State Data Centre. “Steps have been initiated to segregate services that are being offered through other platforms and link them with the State Data Centre,” a senior official told The Hindu .
Work in this direction is expected to be started soon and “it will take a few days for us to link them to the State Data Centre”, the official said.
Shifting delayed
Shifting of the SWAN and SCAN from the old secretariat premises has, however, been kept on hold after the government has invited applications pertaining to the layout regularization scheme online and other applications relating to the Public Service Commission as these services are hosted on the state wide area network. “Shifting of the network may require switching off the network till the time its functioning from the new premises is tested,” the official said.
The shifting process has therefore been kept on hold to ensure that there is no interruption in the receipt of the LRS applications. Another major factor that had to be addressed was setting up of backup mechanism for the online systems.
There was strong backup mechanism in place for the applications with public interface. However, there were some issues that should be looked into in the backup mechanism related to non-public interface applications including those like inter-departmental communications. “The department is engaged in putting in place a strong backup mechanism for these applications too and it will be set up in a matter of few days,” the official said.
