Innovation with IT

Delivering citizen services

Infrastructure needs to be built for all aspects of e-governance, be it delivery of services by the government or access of services by citizens. Data Centre Infrastructure is a key component to facilitate efficient, reliable and trusted delivery of citizen services. NIC has set up a National Data Centre at its headquarters to cater to e-governance initiatives in India. A large component of this infrastructure is configured on Microsoft technologies. More than 200 plus high-end servers are deployed under this infrastructure, catering to a wide variety of e-governance requirements, ranging from basic websites, national and state level web portals to highly complex sector specific e-governance applications. Over 2,200 websites/portals including websites of the Parliament of India, National Advisory Council, Prime Minister’s Office, state governments are hosted on this infrastructure. Some of the popular e-governance applications such as Agmarknet, Exam Results, and CIC websites are also hosted on the same.

A large number of groups were involved in developing ICT applications using Microsoft technologies for various government ministries and departments as well as state governments. Deployment of an application on secure, reliable and scalable infrastructure was a challenge for each of these groups. Besides investment in high-end computing resources, they needed to equip themselves with the skills to administer them as well. So a solution was needed to optimise the manpower in the government.

Process
A centrally managed infrastructure for Microsoft technologies at NIC Data Centre was set up. The infrastructure was further strengthened with the use of Storage Area Network, central backup and restore facility as well as performance tuning, clustered servers and load balancing solutions. The disaster recovery setup of this infrastructure was installed at NIC Hyderabad. The infrastructure extends supports to legacy applications. A core group was set up to effectively and efficiently manage this infrastructure. The  group also advises the developer community and develops best practices for developing and deploying e-governance applications on Microsoft infrastructure.

Impact
The solution provided can act as an instantly available infrastructure for launching any e-governance initiative. It provides a cost effective solution, further helped by the sharing of resources, saves on resources by drawing on the expertise of the core group and provides scalable, secure and easily availabile applications.