The Data Centre has the latest of technologies to meet ICT needs of the government Hon’ble Union Minister of Electronics & Information Technology and Law & Justice, Shri Ravi Shankar Prasad inaugurated a new state-of-the-art software-defined National Data Centre (NDC) at Bhubaneswar on 28th May 2018. The inaugural ceremony was held in the presence of Shri Dharmendra Pradhan, Hon’ble Union Minister of Petroleum & Natural Gas and Skill Development & Entrepreneurship, Shri Chandra Sarathi Behera, Hon’ble Minister of State (Independent Charge), Electronics & IT, Sports & Youth Services, Govt. of Odisha, Shri Ajay Sawhney, Secretary, Ministry of Electronics & IT and Smt. Neeta Verma, Director General, NIC.
NDC, Bhubaneswar has been conceptualised and established as per global standards to meet the increasing requirements for the hosting of mission critical applications, engaged for citizen service delivery in high availability and secure environment.
Speaking on the occasion, Shri Ravi Shankar Prasad stated that NIC is present in 700 Districts of India and it is the backbone of e-Governance and Digital India. The fourth NDC at Bhubaneswar after Delhi, Hyderabad and Pune will play an important role in the Digital India Programme envisaged by the Government. Emphasising the significance of the new NDC, Hon’ble Minister further said that in the IT ecosystem, Data Centre adds to the digital cloud of a state or location and raises its global profile. Hon’ble Minister appreciated the efforts of the District Informatics Officers (DIOs) in migrating all the district portals of Odisha to S3WaaS in Odia language.
Shri Dharmendra Pradhan appreciated the efforts of NIC in establishing the NDC at Bhubaneswar which will provide a platform for growth and use of Digital India in the state of Odisha. The new state-of-the-art cloud-enabled NDC, Bhubaneswar will offer 24x7 operations with secure hosting for e-Governance applications of the government and its departments. The unified and shared infrastructure has a built-up area of over 40,000 sq. ft., with 275 racks. This energy efficient setup is flexible enough to rapidly respond to Infrastructure requirements and also accommodate future technology enhancements. The NDC clearly demonstrates NIC’s endeavour to provide latest technology solutions to meet the ICT needs of the government while maintaining the standards.
NDC is equipped with multi-level redundancy, containment based cooling, automated security access controls etc., for 24x7 operations. Some of the other security features include Multi-factor Authentication such as smart card swipe and biometric systems. NDC, Bhubaneswar also provides world-class cold aisle containment based cooling solutions for higher IT power needs.
With the launch of NDC, Bhubaneswar, cloud service offerings of NIC would allow departments to provide infrastructure, add the computing capacity on demand and release them when not required. This elastic nature of the cloud allows departments not only to bring the solution to deployment quickly, but also to scale according to the demand of peak or low loads.
Since 2002, NIC has been setting up Data Centres at various places, which includes a National Data Centre in Delhi and Mini Data Centres in the state capitals, hosting applications of the Central and State governments. The MeghRaj initiative of the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology envisages the use cloud computing to accelerate delivery of e-Governance services in the country while optimizing ICT spending of the government.
Other Launches On the occasion, the Hon’ble Union Minister also launched the District Portals of all the the districts of Odisha. These portals are are accessible in English and Odia language, and has been developed in S3WaaS platform of NIC. Odisha began its record 45 days portal migration journey in April 2018, with Cuttack becoming the first district to migrate to S3WaaS, followed by Bhadrak District. Odisha is the first state in the Eastern region to implement and migrate all district portals to S3WaaS.
e-Saubhagya (Bijuli Bati Mobile App) to facilitate last mile connectivity and electricity connections to all remaining un-electrified households in the state of Odisha was also launched during the occasion. The data captured through this mobile application would be synchronised with the central portal of the Saubhagya Scheme. Various analytical reports and graphs are envisaged to be provided through its dashboard.