Jio Platforms wins contract from NIC worth Rs 350 crore to manage cloud services

According to a news source, Jio Platforms has been awarded a contract to maintain and improve the cloud services of the government’s National Informatics Centre (NIC). The deal is worth Rs 350 crore.

Jio Platforms, a subsidiary of the Reliance Industries Group, will enhance the NIC’s national cloud services and will be installed at the National Data Centres in Delhi, Pune, and Bhubaneswar. NIC is the technology backbone of the government. The contract is for five years and it includes onsite maintenance.

A source from Jio informed the news source that “Jio has won the tender and has begun working on it.” “We are starting with overseeing their cloud services in Hyderabad and Bhubaneswar. For the management of NIC cloud solutions under Meghraj 2.0, NIC Services Inc. (NICSI) had requested proposals from Indian cloud partners.

NIC was in search of a system integrator to improve NIC’s national cloud infrastructure and enable its multi-cloud services.

With the growing demand of online services, the government is launching more eGovernance projects and hence increased the requirements for efficient data centres and strategic infrastructure.

NIC is also looking forward to build national data centres in Delhi, Pune, Bhubaneswar and Hyderabad, and 30 small data centres in state capitals.

The data centres will offer hosting services like physical hosting, shared hosting, and dedicated servers with managed hosting solutions to the government. They will also provide infrastructure services like collocation and bandwidth, and disaster recovery, the report said.

As a part of its services, Jio will also configure a unified cloud management platform and provide secure cloud services to government users. A cloud application marketplace to improve the NIC National Cloud will also be developed by Jio.

The cloud services will also be operated and maintained by Jio for a period of five years. At present, the national data centres in Delhi, Hyderabad, Pune and Bhubaneswar are dedicated to host NIC National Cloud under the umbrella of Meghraj Cloud.

Meghraj is the Centre's initiative to provide a wide range of services, including IaaS, PaaS and SaaS, which can be used to host websites, portals, web and mobile applications.