Odishatv Bureau

Bhubaneswar: The capital city now becomes the fourth National data centre of National Informatics Centre (NIC) after Delhi, Hyderabad and Pune as Union Minister of Electronics & IT, Ravi Shankar Prasad unveiled a new data centre here today.

Prasad said that this data centre in Bhubaneswar is of global standards. Emphasizing the significance of the new national data centre, Prasad stated, “Data centre is important because data sanctity is vital and in the IT ecosystem, it adds to the digital clout of a State or location and raises its global profile.”

Petroleum and Natural Gas Minister Dharmendra Pradhan who was also present on the occasion, said that the NDC would further enhance the range of Data Centre-related services offered by NIC.

"With a slew of Government apps including mygov, eWay bill, public finance management system, eHospials all being hosted by NIC, the demand for computing and storage has increased many folds," Neeta Verma, Director General of NIC said at the launch.

NIC currently has 4,500 people across India in its various operations and will hire 800 professionals in the next one year, including for 355 cyber security experts, to tackle the rising risks of cyber security. NIC also provides technology support to all governance services and hosts nearly 10,000 websites of the Government, sources said.

The new cloud-enabled National Data Centre aims to offer round-the-clock operations with secure hosting for various e-governance applications of Central and State Governments and has the ability to support 35,000 virtual servers.

It will also provide benefits like on-demand access to ICT (Information and Communication Technology) infrastructure for easy availability and quick deployment of applications and standardized platforms of deployment. In the traditional model, departments have to budget and procure infrastructure at the commencement of the project, leading to either over-provisioning of infrastructure or under-sizing of the requirements whereas the cloud service offerings of NIC would allow departments to provision infrastructure and add to the computing capacity ‘on demand’.

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