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The Indian government’s Cloud roadmap

With no road map from the centre to hop on to the Cloud, state governments are doing their own test runs, creating multiple opportunities for vendors. By Heena Jhingan

The Indian government is moving to adopt the Cloud faster than the large enterprise segment. Some state governments are already consuming services from others through this model and there is potential to employ Cloud computing for things like sharing SDCs. Obviously, thanks to the sensitive nature of information handled by the government and data residency issues, the private Cloud is going to be the preferred option for this sector.

“Governments in BRICS are extremely active participants in the Cloud ecosystem. The government of India is actively promoting Cloud computing through the construction of various test beds and the launch of multiple Cloud service initiatives such as e-governance, Cloud grids etc.,” said Praveen Bhadada, Manager- Global Consulting, Zinnov Management Consulting Pvt. Ltd.

The Jammu & Kashmir state government is the first to adopt Cloud computing for its e-governance services. The government, using the State Data Centers based out of Madhya Pradesh, is provisioning e-governance services such as issuing death or birth certificates and trade licenses through the Cloud. It is using Microsoft’s solution to implement Cloud computing. The governments of Himachal Pradesh and Uttaranchal are also in discussions with Microsoft to roll out e-Government services based on the Cloud platform.

“The government can apply the Cloud to- Government-to-Government, (G2G), Government-to-Business, Government-to-Citizen (G2C) and Government-to-Employee (G2E),” said Rajesh Rajan, Managing Consultant, PwC India.

Neil Pollock, Head of Integrated Managed Services, Bharti Airtel, said, “Like the Internet, the Cloud has emerged as a disruptive technology that has the potential to enable scalability, cost optimization, on-demand access to software, storage, network and other platform services. It has attracted the attention of the government not only in India but in other developed nations as well.”

“The beauty of the Cloud is that it is ubiquitous and that it eases the hassles associated with zero downtime,” commented Karan Kirpalani, DGM, Product Management, Netmagic.

According to Saji Thoppil, General Manager, Enterprise Cloud Computing, Wipro Infotech, “The drivers for Cloud adoption in a government project are no different from those in any private institution. There exist specific areas like procurement wherein a Cloud model can reduce the time to market.”

“Authentication is a crucial component of applications and this function is mostly reinvented, particularly in e-governance applications. If authentication can be provided by UID as a robust service and complemented with an integrated platform stack, it has the potential to be a big catalyst for Cloud adoption in our country,” he added.

"The government will have to identify the low hanging fruit and make Choices to bring some of its e-governance applications on to the Cloud." Vishnu Bhat VP & Global Head - Cloud, Infosys

Vishnu Bhat, Vice President and Global Head - Cloud, Infosys, concurred. He said, “There are a slew of opportunities coming from the Cloud but, like any other enterprise, the government will also have to identify the low hanging fruit. Just as the ministry has identified 27 mission critical projects for e-governance, similarly, choices have to be made to bring some applications on to the Cloud.”

“The government has taken into consideration two critical factors. The first is that of cost and the second is the time taken to roll out services. By adopting Cloud computing, government agencies can create a central pool of shared resources including software and infrastructure. The consolidation of resources and the fact that Cloud computing is more cost-effective, leads to a reduction in ICT spending,” said Sandeep Sehgal, Head - Government Vertical & ISV Red Hat India.

The Cloud model helps do away with upfront costs. Manoj Dwivedi, Secretary to Government, IT department, J&K, said, “Principally, it is for those who do not deploy their own infrastructure at all and solely use the services on the Cloud. However, we are already working on building our own SDC and CSCs and a SWAN. For us, the Cloud has definitely saved time in rolling out G2C services but we will still be spending on the planned infrastructure.”

"If two or more states consume IT-as-a-service using the private Cloud model, it could save the exchequer almost 50% of the Rs. 1,378 crores allocated for state data center projects." P Sridhar Reddy CEO & CMD, CtrlS Data centers

According to P Sridhar Reddy, CEO and CMD, CtrlS Data centers, government estimates say that, if two or more states consume IT-as-a-service using the private Cloud model, it could save the exchequer almost 50% of the Rs. 1,378 crores allocated for state data center projects.

Sehgal observed, “Another key advantage is the elimination of the need to procure, monitor, and maintain IT resources. This too is the responsibility of the service provider under the delivery model. Apart from reducing the workload, this reduces the need for IT staff and allows the government or agencies to focus on their core areas of work.”

Despite the hype, most of the progress that is happening on the Cloud side is in the form of pilots in various states. Bhadada said, “All of these developments are still in the pilot stage. There is not a single working model which cannot be replicated in the states. Maybe three years down the line, we might get to that.”

He added that adoption was quicker in states like Gujarat, Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka, where IT outsourcing had picked up. SDCs will be operational in 16 states by June 2011 and in 31 states by December 2011. The real action will start sometime around then.

Golok Kumar Simli, Principal Consultant (Tech), Passport Seva Project, believed that technology was not an impediment be it for the Cloud or third party hosting. “The government will benefit from the use of Cloud environments but the challenge is with regards to the level of preparedness of the concerned departments when it comes to existing legacy applications supporting Cloud technology.”

“The government can immediately use the IaaS aspect of the Cloud as there are no security hassles involved here but regulatory and legal concerns continue to exist. The IT, application and database administrators of the government departments want to be assured that they can revert to more a conventional setup whenever they want. It has to be ensured that the control of information remains within the department in law and in fact. In IaaS, the control stays with the concerned departments, so if at any point of time the department wants to come back, it can do so,” he said.

Simli added that even on the application side there was no readiness with regard to regulatory compliance. Cloud providers need to understand a department’s internal mechanism. Presently, departments lack the maturity to independently design their own applications, and when a third party takes up this activity it may not be completely aware of the operational mechanism of the department or agency in question. Moreover, third parties (PPP partners) lack domain expertise.

Agencies are uncomfortable with the thought of sharing data. It isn’t about security. Rather, the fundamental factor is of tenancy. “It is a general fallacy that multi-tenancy means less security. The government has the benefit of choosing from best-of-breed options rather than trapping itself by picking a single vendor,” Kirpalani added.

"State governments can start by virtualizing the physical data center and migrate it to the Cloud to enjoy significant OPEX & CAPEX benefits." KP Unnikrishnan APAC Mktg. Director, Brocade Communications

The first step is to see if existing infrastructure can be shared using virtualization, which is a basic step to the Cloud. “With state data centers in place at most state headquarters, the states need to ensure that all departments working on e-governance projects share this infrastructure rather than buying individual servers or storage. Once this is agreed upon and a policy framed for ensuring data security, governments can think of the next step, which is the Cloud,” suggested Sehgal.

“State governments can start by virtualizing the physical data center and then migrate it to the Cloud to enjoy significant operational and CAPEX benefits. Spurring this physical to virtual to Cloud (P2V2C) trend is the fact that a host of Cloud migration offerings have been developed, and are available in the market,” said KP Unnikrishnan, APAC Marketing Director, Brocade Communications.

Private, Public or Hybrid?

When it comes to the choice of model, private Cloud seems to be the preferred one.

Sid Deshpande, Senior Research Analyst, Gartner, said, “There are no set examples and agencies will have to evaluate as to which services or applications can be put on the Cloud. No sensitive data can be shared over a public Cloud.”

R Ravichandran, Director Sales, Intel South Asia, said, “At a infrastructure build out level, to increase the pace of e-governance roll outs for many projects instead of building multiple resources, the government can provide a centralized IaaS or PaaS solution for the various departments or state government to build the required solution delivery capability from their end. The department or state government needn’t worry about the backend in this scenario and it would be able to run its application or services from this back end government Cloud. This would not only increase the pace of the e-governance enablement but also bring in interoperability, reducing costs by leveraging infrastructure and enable greater scaling.”

Venkatesh Iyer, Head - VCE, India & SAARC, EMC, said, “While evaluating Clouds, government agencies have to be selective about what applications, data and services should not be transitioned to the Cloud. We see government departments more inclined towards the private Cloud, in which the data center operates as an Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) utility.

“A hybrid Cloud model is more flexible as it is composed of two or more Clouds that can interoperate through networking technologies, across data centers or organizational boundaries The Cloud model will be best suited for delivering citizen services. It offers a consolidated approach to share resources, allowing cities to be more efficiently planned, managed, and operated based on networked information and provides citizens with access to a wide variety of services anytime, anywhere and on any device, “ said Rajesh Rege, Sr. Vice President - Data Center, India & SAARC, Cisco.

Simli added, “The government can consider the Cloud in two ways—either through the hybrid or through the community model. The hybrid Cloud helps optimize costs by using your existing infrastructure. The good thing about the hybrid Cloud is that it gives you the benefit of exercising strategic control. Migrating government applications to the Cloud is a quite a challenging task.”

Having worked with the Kerala State IT Mission on one of its pilots, Madhusudhana Rao S, Program Coordinator- Cloud, C-DAC-Chennai, said, “Application re-engineering is required to enable multi-tenancy on legacy or monolithic applications that have been operational for many years and for the efficient utilization of resources and a single application instance across multiple government entities.”

There are obvious challenges ahead of the government agencies that include adopting the right strategy for business continuity, identifying platforms, security, auditing and logging, data recovery, low IT maturity and high resistance to change, multiplicity of agencies involved in the implementation, longer procurement cycles and, most importantly, regulatory compliance.

“The Cloud is a new technology and the government will have come up with an exceptionally good PoC in order to convince agencies to adopt it,” said KR Gururaja Rao, Chairman & MD, Gujarat Informatics Ltd, the agency that focuses on IT development for the state.

Ravichandran of Intel said that, for Cloud computing to realize its true potential as it evolved, it was essential that there was a level of openness and solutions interoperability.

Moorthy Uppaluri, GM, DPE, Microsoft India, agreed that open standards were vital for government Clouds. He said, “We are committed to ensuring open connections, promoting data portability and providing tools to manage data and easily and efficiently move it in and out of the Cloud and other platforms.” Microsoft launched the Open Government Data Initiative (OGDI) in 2009 to help cities make government data available to the public and to developers by leveraging Cloud computing, industry standards and open source components. Vancouver and Edmonton, Canada, have already launched online sites based on OGDI that give their citizens transparent access to information.

Privacy, needs regulation?

While the various government agencies and solution providers rue the lack of a specific national roadmap for migration to the Cloud, Shankar Aggarwal, Additional Secretary, DCIT, reasoned, “There is no roadmap because, even though the technology and concept is mature, the idea of making use of sharable technologies by the government agencies is new. We would like the state governments to understand their need and then make use of the technology.”

He added that it was vital understand the diversity in the federal structure where each state could have its specific requirements. Today, each state has its own state data center, and the idea is not to immediately connect all states to a central network.

For services where there is uniformity, a single platform can be more effective as in the case of GST, this is one app that could be hosted on a central platform.

Privacy laws could impact Cloud adoption. It is important for decision-makers to consider these as a priority while deciding on the Cloud policy that is expected to be released in 2010

“Looking at the way that the Cloud is deployed by most competent providers, the privacy laws are sure to be honored. Adherence to these laws calls for well defined security controls to be adopted by a Cloud service provider. Privacy laws will have implications on the adoption of Cloud-based services in India,” said Pollock.

Educate and sell

At a time when the government agencies are doing their bit to understand the Cloud, solution providers are putting in efforts to help them do so.

Iyer said, “Enthusiasm exists on both sides; we recently launched a Cloud computing center along with Cisco. We are also dedicating a large part of our R&D investments towards virtualization technologies.”

Infosys’ Bhat said that the solution provider had about 20 partners on board for Cloud enabling technologies.

Analysts said that most agencies were piloting on the Cloud more as a ‘me too’ phenomenon as they hadn’t heard of a success story to date. Across the world, agencies are gradually moving to the Cloud. In India, the agencies are looking to the UID project for direction.

“UID is a unique project run on a private entrepreneurial model. Eventually, it will become a bigger opportunity. If UID becomes a platform, then people will write applications on it and it will become a huge opportunity. The project will bring substantial returns to the country in terms of opportunities and learning opportunities, “concluded Bhadada.

heena.jhingan@expressindia.com