At a conference I attended recently on Cloud computing, an interesting debate
emerged on how can Cloud computing be used to help the social cause. How can it
be used to benefit the society at large? When it comes to society and social
upliftment, the first thing that comes to my mind are the various e-governance
initiatives that the govt has been taking over the past so many years.
Lots of extremely good e-governance projects have been implemented, some of
which have even won the PCQuest Best IT Implementation Award. Many of these
projects were even considered for replication by other states. While this is a
good thing, it takes ages to execute, not only due to the bureaucratic hurdles
and red tape, but also because they have very large scale. The IT requirements
of such projects are very significant. So while the project planning time could
be cut down in replicating such projects, the IT deployment itself can take
ages. This is where cloud computing can really help.
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Anil Chopra, Editor |
If a project by a state Govt can be implemented in a private cloud, then it
could easily be offered to other states. The Govt of J&K has already set a fine
example of this, by using computing services from MP Govt's state data center to
offer citizen services. This saved the J&K Govt considerable cost and time to
roll out the services for its citizens.
Now, there are already plans to setup state data centers for all states.
While this is a good initiative, it would be much more cost effective if the
front-runner states who've already set up their own data centers could share
their IT infrastructure to host e-gov projects of other states. The benefits of
this could be immense.
For one, e-gov projects could be rolled out much faster. Two, state Govts
that are yet to setup their own data centers would save immense costs in setting
up new data centers, which would then consume lots of power in an already power
deficient nation. Three, the states that host e-gov projects of other states can
earn by charging others on a pay-per-use basis.
Four, a successful and proven e-gov project deployed by one state could be
adopted by other states quickly and easily. Here, the proverbial wheel won't
have to be re-invented by the other states! Take the various state police
departments for instance. Many of them are considering to maintain criminal
records centrally, and provide their police force access to these records over
smartphones. If this system could be centralized in a cloud computing
environment, wherein the criminal case records of all states are maintained,
then tracking criminals would become much easier, even if a criminal moves off
to another state.
Cloud computing therefore has the potential to speed up various projects of
the Govt. The technology can save the Govt thousands of crores, which are
usually lost due to cost over-runs caused by project delays!