Mumbai: The state government is going to store data of about 1.25 lakh documents generated every day in virtual space like Amazon cloud, raising security concerns.
A cloud policy formed by the government said that at present the government has 75 data centres for which it spends Rs 250 to Rs 500 crore every year. But by using cloud technology, the government will save money and the public can access the documents by paying a certain amount to the cloud company. We are making policy on public cloud. I am confident this will open up new doors of opportunities for start ups,” said chief minister Devendra Fadnavis on Wednesday.
With the help of cloud technology, the government can store its day-to-day data files, documents, government resolutions, notifications and employees data virtually.
"At present we are spending Rs 250 crore to Rs 500 crore every year for data centres. By adopting cloud technology, we will be saving Rs 7,000 crore to Rs 8,000 crore. We generate 1.25 lakh documents every day in the government which will be transferred to clouds,” said Kaustubh Dhawse, officer on special duty with the CM. The government has about 75 data centres that take care of the data on day to day basis at present. A four member panel headed by IT secretary will be implementing the policy.
However, experts are divided on the government storing data on cloud. Abhishek Belnekar, Technology Lead At Tata Consultancy Services pointed out, “Security from data leak, data loss will have to borne by the cloud provider, wherein security from data theft and unlawful use have to be borne by individual user."
Senior advisory consultant to IBM, Hemalee Parkar welcomed the move. “Many European countries have adopted the cloud technology for their governments. It is the future and will help in avoiding infrastructure used for data centres. The cloud services are secured and hacking or data theft is not a problem with cloud service alone. It can happen with any technology,” she said.
Enterprise Architect Tirthraj Samant said, “It may be a good idea to go for cloud based data storage. The cloud provider lets you define the encryption algorithm and keys so the storage is secure. Even government bodies in the US are using public clouds for some departments.”
