National Informatics Centre sets up fourth data unit; to hire 800 people 

National Informatics Centre (NIC), which provides technical support for all governance services, has set up its fourth data unit.

NIC hosts nearly 10,000 websites of the Indian government. Its existing branches are located in Delhi, Hyderabad and Pune.

The new cloud-enabled data centre in Bhubaneswar will offer round-the-clock operations with secure hosting for various e-governance applications for both the central and state governments. It has the capacity to support 35,000 virtual servers.

"With a slew of government apps including mygov, eWay bill, public finance management system, eHospitals all being hosted by NIC, the demand for computing and storage has increased manifold," said Neeta Verma, director general of NIC.

NIC is also expected to add 800 more people to its 4,500-strong workforce across the country over the next year. The fresh hires will include 355 cybersecurity experts.

Verma further said that the new data centre will provide services such as on-demand access to information and communication technology (ICT), infrastructure for easy availability and quick deployment of applications, and provide standardised platforms for deployment. 

NIC has nearly 1,000 racks and more than 3,350 servers spread across its data centres. All government projects are hosted at these centres which support the Digital India initiative.

The government has launched other cloud-based initiatives as well in the past. 

In February 2014, the central government had launched a GI Cloud Initiative called “Meghraj” to accelerate delivery of e-services in the country and proliferation of cloud services. This ‘national cloud’ initiative was also aimed at optimising spending on ICT.