India’s National Informatics Centre (NIC) has deployed the open source Eucalyptus cloud software in an effort to boost its e-Governance cloud project that NIC claims is delivering IT services to remote districts and villages throughout the country.
The Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) software will help NIC, a division of the Department of Information Technology, to provide network backbone and a wide range of information and communication technologies (ICT) services to government organizations across the country.
The NIC e-Governance project’s major ICT services include improvement in government services, wider transparency of national and local government institutions, and creation of a nationwide communication network for decentralized planning. The high performance architecture is designed to support the basic needs of remote districts and villages through always-on, scalable and affordable compute resources. The new tool will help NIC to provide remotely-provisioned cloud-based services in areas where on-site server infrastructure cannot be deployed as well as tackle downtime in these areas.
Applications such as e-procurement, payroll, grievance redressal and integrated drug surveillance will soon be hosted on Eucalyptus clouds on a national level, according to NIC.
