MeitY to collaborate with an Indian cloud partner to manage MeghRaj 2.0

National Informatics Centre Services (NICS), the MeitY (ministry of Electronics and Information Technology) affiliated body to collaborate with an Indian Cloud Partner (ICP) to set up and manage GI cloud solution – MeghRaj 2.0 and assist government departments to build accelerating delivery of e-services in the country while optimizing ICT spending of the government.

According to a request for proposal (RFP) document floated by NICS, the ICP is expected to take over the existing non-IT infrastructure (DG, UPS, HVAC, etc.) of entire National Data Centers at Hyderabad and Bhubaneshwar locations and manage it during the O&M for seven years post implementation/ Go live. NICSI/ NIC may expand this 50-rack on-prem infrastructure in future beyond 50 racks at both locations, as part of this RFP/project.

Since 2001, NIC has established National Data Centers and Mini-Data Centers in every state capital, hosting all important governmental applications. The MeghRaj initiative of the was launched in response to the growing understanding of the advantages of using the cloud for efficient service delivery. This initiative envisioned using the cloud to speed up the delivery of e-services in the nation while maximising ICT spending.

NIC has spearheaded the e-governance drive in the country for the last three decades, building a strong foundation for better and more transparent governance and assisting the governments in reaching the unreached.

The services expected to be offered under Meghraj 2.0 are:

• Platform as a Service (PaaS)
• Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)
• Security as a Service
• Vulnerability Assessment Service
• Anti-virus Service
• Backup Service
• Public IP Service
• Load Balancer as a Service
• Web Application Firewall (WAF) Service
• Container as a service
• Kubernetes as a Service
• Storage as a Service
• Resource Monitoring as a Service
• Resource Metering as a Service
• Database as a Service
• Others – On Demand/Specialized services These cloud services need to be provided in a managed service model

NIC is offering critical IT infrastructure services to the government including network, data centers, cloud, cyber security, messaging, video conferencing and GIS infrastructure.