Jio Platforms secures Rs 350 crore deal to manage NIC’s cloud services

Jio Platforms has bagged a Rs 350-crore contract to manage and enhance the cloud services of the government’s National Informatics Centre (NIC), sources said.

The Reliance Industries Group firm has been selected to enhance NIC national cloud services and will be deployed at the National Data Centre in Delhi, Pune and Bhubaneswar. NIC is the government’s technology backbone. Jio’s contract includes five years of onsite maintenance.

“Jio has won the tender and has started working on it,” a source from Jio said. “We are starting with managing their cloud services in Bhubaneswar and Hyderabad. NIC Services Inc. (NICSI) had requested proposals from Indian cloud partners for managing NIC cloud solutions under Meghraj 2.0.”

“They sought a system integrator for enhancing NIC’s national cloud infrastructure and enabling its multi cloud services,” the source said.

As per NICSI, data centre requirements are growing exponentially as people’s expectations from online services have increased and the government continues to launch eGovernance projects.

There is a need to set up strategic infrastructure that facilitates high availability, quick scalability, efficient management and optimised utilisation of resources.

To fulfil this requirement, NIC/NICSI has set up national data centres in Delhi, Pune, Bhubaneswar and Hyderabad, and 30 small data centres in state capitals to provide services to the government at all levels.

The data centres are designed to provide a full stream of hosting services, which extend from physical to shared hosting, dedicated servers with managed hosting solutions to infrastructure services like collocation and bandwidth, and disaster recovery.

Jio will also configure a multi-cloud orchestrator (unified cloud management platform) and provide secure cloud services to government users. It is also required to develop and offer a cloud application marketplace to enhance NIC National Cloud by commissioning, configuring and integrating various ICT components.

The annual increment of ICT components is expected to be 30-40%. Jio will integrate and configure all such devices, as and when made available, to the cloud service. It will also operate and maintain the cloud service for a period of five years.

The selection comes at a time when the government is also evaluating bids for managing the national government cloud to promote domestic cloud companies against global hyperscalers.

Many mission critical applications/websites of state and central government departments are hosted at these data centres. Currently, the national data centres in Delhi, Hyderabad, Pune and Bhubaneswar are dedicated to host NIC National Cloud under the umbrella of Meghraj Cloud.

Meghraj is a government initiative which has been providing a wide range of services, including IaaS, PaaS and SaaS, which can be used to host websites, portals, web and mobile applications. NIC Cloud Service offers virtual servers, kubernetes containers, DevOps and provides hosting support to all types of applications.

This allows cloud users to avail the services from multiple locations and prepare the disaster recovery setup. In recent years, government organisations have been adopting cloud technologies and hosting their ICT applications on cloud platforms. NextBigWhat