The Hindu: Sharad Vyas: New Delhi: Saturday, January 20, 2018.
Maharashtra has unveiled a public cloud policy, virtually mandating its departments to shift their data storage onto the cloud, which intends to make them available for free to the general public.
“This will accelerate e-governance, and open an area for private sector investments, taking new technologies to all the departments as the government is the biggest data creator and consumer,” Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis said at Maharashtra Technology Summit on Wednesday.
An official said the policy, a first by any State, will create a $2 billion opportunity for the industry. “Every department uses data storage. Now, they will not have to buy boxes. We have made it sort of mandatory.”
The government produces 1.25 lakh documents every day. Most of them are being stored at 75 centralised data centres, resulting in a high maintenance cost.
“With the public cloud, we don’t want to invest on these centres. The idea is to reduce expenditure on IT resources,” said Kaustubh Dhavse, officer on special duty to the CM.
A four-member committee under the secretary of the information technology department has been 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-usage model, officials said. “Our money is very limited. Why should we spend on that when the private sector can do a better job? We should create an enabling environment,” S.V.R. Srinivas, principal secretary, information technology department, said.
The policy is likely to be set in motion through a government resolution. In the next 20 days, five top cloud service providers like Amazon or Microsoft will be empanelled, officials said.
“Public perception even of the blockchain technology — an open source ledger — is still connected to the security aspect. Such systems are not hack-proof, and users will ask questions of it for now,” said Mrutyunjay Mahapatra, deputy managing director and CIO, State Bank of India. The State 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.
Under the framework, the government will make it mandatory for the data to be stored within the country. “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,” Mr. Srinivas said.
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