Day 2/ Session 10

Cloud computing and e-governance

Neeladri Bose focused on the inclusion of cloud computing in e-governance

The government is putting in a lot of effort towards going IT savvy and making its services more useful for citizens equally in urban and rural areas. However, there are many key issues in making the citizen-centric services accessible in rural areas. For service providers it is difficult to reach them and scale up the functionality. For the Below Poverty Line (BPL) population community accessibility and affordability are major issues.

The primary focus of BPL population is to increase their income. They aspire for financial services and access to affordable education. Their next big need is access to affordable health care. Beyond the above, they are seeking all other services that the rest of us enjoy including, entertainment, and other modern facilities.

Neeladri Bose, Sun Microsystems spoke about cloud computing in its various forms and how it could help in e-governance

Contrary to popular wisdom, these people are not looking for dole or upliftment. They are highly self motivated and entrepreneurship is their mantra. They are merely looking for an opportunity.

“There is a clear opportunity divide that exists. To bridge this, we need to leverage on common elements. We need to build the backend for the last mile connector and facilitate building a community of independent business connectors. Also, build the front-end for the service provider. We need to recruit independent business connectors and service providers to use the platform and last mile access,” said Neeladri Bose, Director- Services Delivery, Professional Services, Sun Microsystems.

There is a clear need to build a super ecosystem and bring the entire community under one roof. This is possible through cloud computing. To start with cloud-based services, one needs to define a cloud model that you would like to go with such as public or private cloud, community cloud or hybrid cloud.

The basic tenet of the cloud deployment is multi-tenancy which implies a need for policy-driven enforcement, segmentation, isolation, governance, service levels, and chargeback/billing models for different consumer constituencies.

One should understand the security risks involved. One can take Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) as the foundation. Platform-as-a-service (PaaS) builds on IaaS, Software-as-a-service (SaaS) builds on PaaS, and SaaS is the most integrated functionality. PaaS helps developers build their services on top of a platform. IaaS has limited application-like features but enormous extensibility.

Once you deploy this, it starts as a back-end to the last mile connectors and ends at the front-end to service providers. The tech components include services [bidding/RFP/user profile/registration]; applications [to support the above services]; middleware and infrastructure.

It is complemented by last mile connector and last mile handhelds with the telecom backbone.