Keeping in tune with the changing times, Maharashtra Government has asked all its departments to shift their Applications to ‘Cloud’ computing by October 30, 2018. Department of Information Technology has asked all the departments to review their existing software applications and ensure that the applications are ‘cloud ready’ in time for the said migration.
With the emphasis on cloud computing, the Government is taking a leap ahead in e-governance. With technological advancements, cloud computing is becoming the preferred way for implementing all e-governance projects in the State. The latest move is in accordance with the recommendations in the Cloud Computing Policy prepared by a committee, which was headed by Principal Secretary of Information Technology Department. On January 17, 2018, the Government approved the said policy and now it has issued directions to all departments to take steps accordingly.
As per the latest directions, all the Government organisations, departments, public sector undertakings, urban and rural local bodies to use cloud infrastructure services instead of using Government owned data centres. It has asked the Government organisations to ‘strictly avoid’ procurement of new hardware in existing data centres. The deadline of October 30, 2018, has been set for the departments to migrate to cloud computing.
To facilitate the process, Department of Information Technology will empanel cloud service operators by April 30. “The departments will be free to avail of the services from any of the empanelled cloud service providers as per the rates to be notified by Department of Information Technology’, states the latest directive. The departments will be provided with options of private cloud, public cloud, and hybrid cloud. In each of these options, the facilities of infrastructure as a service, platform as a service, and software as a service will be made available for departments to choose from as per their requirements.
In using infrastructure as a service mode, the department concerned uses fundamental computing resources such as processing power, storage, networking components or middleware. The department concerned can control the operating system, storage, deployed applications and possibly networking.
In platform as a service mode, the department concerned uses a hosting environment for its applications. It controls the applications that run in the environment (and possibly has some control over the hosting environment), but does not control the operating system, hardware or network infrastructure on which they are running. The platform is typically a virtual machine.
As far as cloud service delivery model of software as a service is concerned, the department concerned uses an application but does not control the operating system, hardware or network infrastructure on which it is running.
However, the departments will have to use guidelines regarding Cloud Assessment Framework for choosing cloud service suitable for them. At the same time, the departments will have to keep in mind nature and sensitivity of the data in terms of privacy, confidentiality, State and National security, and requirements under Right to Information Act.
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Quelle/Source: The Hitavada, 01.02.2018
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