Bhubaneswar has become the fourth National data centre of National Informatics Centre, NIC after Delhi, Hyderabad and Pune.

The new cloud-enabled National Data Centre aims to offer round-the-clock operations with secure hosting for various e-governance applications of Central and State Governments and has ability to support 35,000 virtual servers.

Unveiling the data centre today, Minister for Electronics and IT Ravi Shankar Prasad said, the data centre in Bhubaneswar is of global standards.

Emphasizing the significance of the new national data centre, Prasad further said that Data centre is important because data sanctity is important and in the IT ecosystem, data centre adds to the digital clout of a State or location and raises its global profile.

Minister for Petroleum and Natural Gas, Skill Development and Entrepreneurship Dharmendra Pradhan was also present on the occasion.

Director General of NIC Neeta Verma said, with a slew of Government apps including mygov, eWay bill, public finance management system, eHospials all being hosted by NIC, the demand for computing and storage has increased many folds.

She said, NIC currently has 4,500 people across India in its various operations and will hire 800 professionals in the next one year, including for 355 cyber security experts,to tackle rising risks of cyber security.

She said, NIC provides technology support to all governance services and hosts nearly 10,000 websites of the Government.

The new cloud-enabled National Data Centre will provide benefits like on-demand access to ICT (Information and Communication Technology) infrastructure for easy availability and quick deployment of applications and standardized platforms of deployment.

In the traditional model, Departments have to budget and procure infrastructure at the commencement of the project, leading to either over provisioning of infrastructure or under-sizing of the requirements whereas the cloud service offerings of NIC would allow departments to provision infrastructure and add to the computing capacity on demand.