NIC launches new data centre in Bhubaneswar

Bhubaneswar, May 28 (IANS) The National Informatics Center (NIC) on Monday launched here its fourth data centre, its first one in eastern India.

The earlier data centres are at New Delhi, Hyderabad and Pune.

Union Electronics and IT Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad inaugurated the centre in presence of Petroleum Minister Dharmendra Pradhan and Odisha IT Minister Chandra Sarathi Behera.

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.

Prasad said that this data centre in Bhubaneswar is of global standards, and will boost the digital development of Odisha.

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

In his remarks, Pradhan said: "National Data Centre will provide better job opportunities to the youths of Odisha. We have huge human resource in digital rntrepreneurship, IT, digital governance & economy." 

The data centre will cater to demand not just from the national projects but also from the state governments, he added.

"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," said NIC Director General Neeta Verma.

She said NIC will hire 800 people all over India in the next one year including 355 cyber security professionals, to tackle "rising risks of cyber security".