Enabling service delivery for Bharat

March 16, 2022

Rajesh Awasthi

Budget 2022 unearthed a new face of India that is progressive, pragmatic and decisive. With an aim of elevating governance to the next level, the government thoroughly focused on the need for ‘digital’ across sectors. In this blog Rajesh Awasthi, VP & Global Head of Managed Hosting and Cloud Services, Tata Communications, explores how the government in Indian has best managed service delivery.

Gartner said in India the government spending on technology stood at $9.6 billion as of 2021, and it is further expected to grow 11.6% in 2022 to $10.7 billion.

For example, in the healthcare sector, the roll out of an open platform for the National Digital Health Ecosystem (NDHE) was announced. The platform aims at consisting digital registries of health providers, health facilities, unique health identity and universal access to health facilities. Facilitating such a comprehensive platform requires a robust tech infrastructure, the right skillset and a constant monitoring model. To leapfrog on these fronts and more, the Government of India has been strategically fostering public-private service delivery models well ahead of time. Especially, with projects requiring extensive tech intervention.

Managed Services Providers for an integrated play

The NDHE platform aims to ease the process of receiving adequate medical aid for Covid-19 or any other healthcare concerns. Large volumes of data get generated from this platform. Computing such data requires state-of-the-art platform, deep technical know-how coupled with intelligent software. Alongside, factors like protecting this infrastructure from cyber-security breaches also require separate attention.

When managing cloud environments, you may have a data centre or cloud node within the country, however the management of that can happen outside the country. Some part of that metadata goes out of the country.

“Responsible digital partners will ensure that native deployment has security controls and firewalls built in.”

This ensures adherence to regulatory compliance, transparency and data privacy, which are critical and is an important mandate with the impending rollout of the data privacy bill.

As a result, the Government is increasingly looking for holistic digital ecosystem enablers that not only provide the cloud services but take care of the overall environment. Managed Services Providers are able to offer cloud platforms that are integrated with all the other complementary technologies that are operation-critical, like network services or threat intelligent systems or so on. Corroborating the same, latest projections by Statista state that the global managed services market will reach $356.24 by 2025, up from $185.98 in 2019.

Kubernetes for scalability

“With the government’s focus on last mile reach, activity count per minute is set to increase. This can be addressed with the help of Kubernetes services, which is the containerised environment.”

Hence, it auto scales as per customer requirements. It has a capability to understand the kind of transactions that are coming in and based on the number, it would scale up the infrastructure. And when the utilisation goes down below a defined threshold, it would also scale down. This is the kind of intelligence in performance that today’s forward-thinking Governments are looking for.

“As the government envisions a digitally empowered society that has a one click access to governance services, it is important to choose the right partners that can help in accentuating this vision.”

Deploying a robust cloud environment is only the beginning of the same. The right IT enabler can go beyond pure-play infrastructure and add multiple value streams like creating a DevOps environment or offer containerized services, backed with security operations services or implement disaster recovery facilities. This means that the Government’s managed services are taken care of without involving any third-party vendor incurring additional expenses or labour. And this is the future of a truly digital India.