MUMBAI: Maharashtra has become the first state to unveil the public cloud technology to speed up e-governance. The step will create business opportunities worth USD 2 billions all the while helping the government departments to shift all their data to clouds, Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis said here on Wednesday.
Fadnavis inaugurated Maharashtra Technology Summit on Block Chain technology today that envisaged to gauge the business opportunities arising out of the step. The summit was jointly organized by the IT department of Maharashtra government and the FICCI.
“The policy will help the government departments to concentrate more on their work instead of running after building data centers and maintaining them. This will also result in additional private sector investments,” Fadnavis said while speaking at the summit.
“Government is the biggest creator and consumer of data and the new technology will help the government departments to access the data generated by other departments freely and with an ease,” Fadnavis added.
The policy has made use of cloud technology sort of mandatory, said a senior government official at the summit.
Government departments currently have their own data storage facilities, which can be done better and cheaper by private sector vendors, the official said.
The policy would be formally set in motion through a detailed government resolution in next couple of weeks and some five-six top cloud service providers would be empanelled, the official added.
“Under the framework, government will make it mandatory for the data to be stored within the country and the broad idea is to use public cloud in cases wherever the Right to Information Act is applicable, and then go in for enhanced security features for private and sensitive data, which will also be stored on the cloud,” SVR Srinivas, Principal Secretary, State information technology department, said.
He said he expects additional investments to come into the Mumbai Metropolitan Region because of the new policy. The region already supports a good number of data centers and advantages like availability of uninterrupted power, presence of academia and talented human resources make it an exciting pocket to be in for the industry, he added.