Jio Platforms has been awarded a Rs 350 crore contract to maintain and improve the cloud services provided by the government's National Informatics Centre (NIC).

 

The Reliance Industries Group company has been chosen to improve NIC's national cloud services and will be set up in Delhi, Pune, and Bhubaneswar at the National Data Centre. NIC is the technological backbone of the government. Onsite maintenance is included in Jio's contract for five years.

 

“Jio has won the tender and has started working on it,” a source from Jio told ET. “We are starting with managing their cloud services in Bhubaneswar and Hyderabad. NIC Services Inc. (NICSI) had requested proposals from Indian cloud partners for managing NIC cloud solutions under Meghraj 2.0.”

 

“They sought a system integrator for enhancing NIC’s national cloud infrastructure and enabling its multi cloud services,” the source said.

 

According to NICSI, as people's expectations for online services have grown and the government continues to roll out eGovernance projects, there is an exponential increase in the need for data centres.

 

Strategic infrastructure must be put in place to support high availability, rapid scaling, effective management, and optimal resource utilisation.

 

In order to meet this need, NIC/NICSI has established 30 mini data centres in state capitals in addition to national data centres in Delhi, Pune, Bhubaneswar, and Hyderabad. These centres will offer services to the government at all levels.

 

The data centres are made to offer a wide range of hosting services, including collocation, bandwidth, shared hosting, dedicated servers with managed hosting solutions, disaster recovery, and physical hosting.

 

Jio will also set up a unified cloud management platform (multi-cloud orchestrator) and offer secure cloud services to government users. Also, a cloud application marketplace must be created and made available in order to improve the NIC National Cloud by commissioning, setting up, and integrating various ICT components.

 

ICT component annual growth is anticipated to range between 30 and 40%. When and if these devices become available, Jio will integrate and configure them for the cloud service. Additionally, it will run and maintain the cloud service for five years.

 

The decision was made at a time when the government is also assessing proposals for managing the national government cloud in an effort to support domestic cloud providers in competition with international hyperscalers.

 

These data centres host a large number of state and federal government entities' mission-critical programmes and websites. At the moment, the Meghraj Cloud is using the national data centres in Delhi, Hyderabad, Pune, and Bhubaneswar to host the NIC National Cloud.

 

Government-sponsored Meghraj offers a variety of services, such as IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS, that may be used to host websites, portals, online applications, and mobile applications. Virtual servers, Kubernetes containers, DevOps, and hosting support are all provided by NIC Cloud Service.

 

This enables cloud users to set up a disaster recovery plan and access the services from several places. Government agencies have started utilising cloud computing services in recent years, putting their ICT applications there.