‘Single data storage facility to boost delivery of services’

Uttarakhand will soon have its first hi-tech centralised data storage centre with a single server on which data of all departments and district-level administrative units will be stored, which will help the government boost delivery and all citizen-centric services, officials said.

“Uttarakhand will be the first state in the country to have such a state-of-the-art centralised data storage centre, which will be based on the world’s advanced system and will be also equipped with green technologies,” said Amit Sinha, director, Information Technology Development Agency (ITDA).

“The mechanism will have a single server on which the entire gamut of data relating to the government, its departments and 13 districts in the state will be stored, which will not only help speed up development but also all citizen centric services,” he said.

“The best part of this centralised data storage centre is that it will have a single server for the data pertaining to the entire state, which will also be absolutely secure,” Sinha said, adding that its security will be “so foolproof that nobody can hack” the data uploaded on its server.

“Supposing, if the server or the data hosted on it is stolen, in that case also a complaint will be registered here in this state only.”

Besides, for the “security of the server the centralised data storage centre is equipped with a number of software and hardware applications”, he said.

Anil Tadkod, head of state e-Governance mission team (SeMT), said the hi-tech mechanism will not only be cost-effective but will also occupy less physical and cyber space.

“That means unlike the past, none of the departments or the district level administrative units will have to hire other servers to host their respective data,” he said.

Earlier, in “absence of a dedicated state-run data storage facility they were forced to hire a number of costly websites like amazon.com etc to host their respective data but the latter was still not secure”.

Such a system, Sinha said, was cost intensive and all departments and also all district level administrative units had to work in silos owing to their data separately stored on different websites.

“The data of the police department, for instance, was hosted on the server of Delhi police. So was the case with the department of tourism and other departments,” he said.

“Similarly, none of our departments had their security policies in place and even if some departments formulated security policies they were not specific to departments.”

Added Tadkod: “Other major advantage of having a dedicated state-run centralised data storage system is that it has ample room for scalability, which means state-of-the-art system can expand itself to accommodate as much data as possible.”

As a result, he said, the government, all its departments and district level administrative units won’t have to purchase server after server from different websites to host their data on them.

“Besides, the maintenance cost of the centralised data storage system is also minimum,” Tadkod said.

The accessibility of the entire data relating to the government departments and district-level units, Sinha clarified, will not only bring in transparency in delivery but will also help speed it up.

“Such a system will help speed up all citizen-centric services, be it tourism, health education and agriculture etc,” he said.

Added Talkode: “Accessibility of data will not only help enhance the departments’ operating efficiency but will also help them in policy making.”

The SeMT, he said, will equip the centralised data storage system with all facilities from software, hardware to back up space.

“They just have to utilise our services and increase their operating efficiency,” Tadkod said referring to the government.