The future roadmap of the digital revolution in India includes Cloud Computing in a big way. Alongside, e-Governance is already at the vanguard of revolutionising governance in the country from ‘system and power-centered’ to ‘resident and service-centered’.
Fusing the two together, the National e-Governance Division (NeGD) of the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) organized the first batch of Capacity Building programme in Cloud Computing for government officials of Central Line ministries, State/UT Departments, Mission Mode Project officers, e-Governance Project heads and State e-Mission teams. The two-day programme was held on August 4-5, 2022, at the Haryana Institute of Public Administration covering participants from Delhi-NCR.
The programme is designed to build capacities, within the Government at both the Central and State levels, by adapting a synchronized approach to ensure the availability of adequate knowledge, appropriate competencies and skill-set to optimally utilise the huge benefits of cloud computing in e-Governance practices. Projects with cloud computing offers integration management with automated problem resolution, manages security end-to-end, and helps budget based on actual usage of data. At a national level, cloud architectures can benefit Government to simultaneously utilize resources optimally and also accelerate delivery of e-services. Project ‘Meghraj’, for instance, is an initiative of the Government of India with the aim of GI Cloud (Meghraj) initiative to fast-track delivery of e-services in the country, while optimising information and communications technology (ICT) spending of the government.
Setting the context of the programme, Shri Satya Meena, Director – Capacity Building, NeGD, said, “Technology has been leapfrogging over the past two decades and one such technology rapidly scaling up is the Cloud-based systems driving businesses and touching every aspect of our daily lives. Anything that is available via the internet has the service being delivered out of a cloud-based application and IT Infrastructure.” The programme’s course director, Shri Satyajit Rao, Senior General Manager, NISG, asserted that “Within this decade, Cloud Computing would replace the traditional data centres and emerge as the prominent solution for data analytics and storage.”
The workshop brought together an array of subject matter experts from the industry, the academia and the government to speak on key domain issues, such as, Cloud fundamentals, India’s Cloud journey, Cloud building blocks, procurement of Cloud services, regulatory and policy framework for Cloud, challenges associated with Cloud implementation and future of Cloud on digital transformation, with engaging presentations on successful Cloud use cases. Session discussions also featured essential training on various components of Cloud computing, such as, custom bidding for Cloud services, establishment of Pay-per-use and billing frequency with Cloud service providers, negotiation instruments for dynamic services under Cloud, best practices in Cloud procurement, focus on the Computing requirements, TRAI and MeitY guidelines on Cloud Computing and ITU global standards on Cloud Computing.
Witnessing attendance from 31 participants – mostly officers from Central Line Ministries, New Delhi and State Governments of Delhi, Punjab, Haryana, Goa, Mizoram and Uttarakhand – capacity building programmes on the theme of cloud computing would move forward with physical programmes to be conducted in the East, West and South zones of India, this year.