Smart and edge data centers for e-governance services

Digital technologies have the power to accelerate inclusive growth in countries such as India. India, being at the peak of its demographic dividend, is poised for exponential growth. The country, through digital transformation, is steadily marching towards realizing a trillion-dollar digital economy by 2025. As governments across the globe embrace digitalization, several governmental processes have incorporated technology into their fold to facilitate e-governance services to their citizens.

E-governance is the usage of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) by the government to improve the quality of services offered to citizens. It is also for the exchange of information, communication transactions and integration of various stand-alone systems and services catering to consumers, businesses, other government bodies, and government employees – referred to as G2C, G2B, G2G, and G2E services respectively. The most prominent G2C e-governance initiatives are Aadhaar, DigiLocker, e-Seva, Digi Dhan, and Apps like Umang.

The government has also made several inroads in the field of education, agriculture, and health care. For example, through online registration facility, getting an OPD appointment, lab reports and blood availability in any government hospital has become convenient. A total of 239 hospitals offering this facility have already registered over 0.34 million patients in the OPD till date. Also, India’s TB missed call initiative has reportedly enrolled over 93,000 patients over a span of four years. In the field of agriculture, mKisan, a mobile-based advisory service linked to call centres connected to research centres has been availed by over 50 million farmers for timely, specific, holistic and needs-based information.

In the field of education, the Credit framework for Skills and Education (CBCS) is enabling students to take courses of their choice, learn at their own pace, undergo additional courses, and adopt an interdisciplinary approach to learning. All 39 central universities have implemented CBCS. Additionally, under the Global Initiative for Academics Network (GIAN) -- an initiative to attract the best foreign academics to Indian Universities of Excellence, 352 courses are being offered by foreign faculty from 38 countries.

Some of the G2B initiatives include e-Procurement and MCA 21, and services catering to the G2G segment include SmartGov and the Khajane Project. All these e-governance platforms are generating huge amounts of data that not only need to be stored but also accessed on-demand, transferred and analyzed within government departments as and when required.

According to IDC, the global datasphere -- the sum of the world’s data, will grow from 33 zettabytes (ZB) in 2018 to a gargantuan 175 ZB by 2025. As the volume, criticality, and sensitivity of data grows, it creates a massive need for e-governance services to adopt holistic infrastructure through data centers that can deliver reliable, innovative and cost-effective solutions.

A data center, therefore, forms the critical core of any e-governance system. Needless to say, the better the data center, the better the e-governance system.

Growing demand for e-governance in India

India is facing a surge in the demand for the transformation of its first-generation e-governance services that harness the power of newer technologies such as Cloud, Big Data, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT) and Analytics. The demand is also fuelled from emerging smart cities and smart policing systems. A huge contributing factor for the growth of e-governance data center players is the fact that India is the second-largest smartphone user globally, with a growing number of subscribers of e-governance services. For example, in August 2019, nearly 5 million people filed their tax returns online -- a record for any single day.

Elements of a robust e-governance data center

Given the value and criticality associated with e-governance data, the data centers that power these services should ideally be capable of withstanding major acts of nature such as floods, hurricanes, earthquakes, tornadoes, typhoons, heat and cold waves, and repercussions of climate change. The technology, hardware and physical infrastructure including servers, storage and network switches, power distribution units (PDUs), computer room air conditioners and HVAC systems need to facilitate business continuity by allowing a high degree of availability and disaster recovery. The systems should offer visibility into network and application traffic, connectivity with disparate sets of data resources, security of the utmost standard, Quality of Service (QoS) as promised, high level of performance and uninterrupted access to users.

Having said that, the data center needs to focus on its power management, cooling, air flow and other parameters crucial for offering seamless services. For this, the infrastructure needs to be smart and energy-efficient.

Edge data centers that are smart

A smart data center can make an e-governance system agile and responsive, while fostering a learning environment and combining best practices, predictive analytics and IT automation. It taps into the power of artificial intelligence (AI) and analytics to achieve positive operational outcomes, optimize cooling and overall data center performance, maximize customer experience, and lower risk and IT costs. While identifying the root cause of issues and their impact on business in minutes, a smart data center can lower the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) by up to 20% and decrease IT response time by up to 30%, besides providing fast, accurate, contextual, actionable insights on a proactive basis.

Moreover, as smart cities unleash the full power of Big Data, IoT, Cloud and streaming services, there is a need for real-time collection and analysis of data on utilities, traffic, security and infrastructure to enable city officials to respond to problems faster than ever before. Hence, there is no room for latency in e-governance services. End users and devices demand anywhere, anytime access to applications and services, and this creates the need for setting up edge data centers for efficient delivery of e-governance services.

Edge data centers facilitate data processing at or near the source of data generation, shortening the distance between the data and the end user. These are generally connected to a larger central data center or to multiple data centers. Today, only 10% of enterprise-generated data is created and processed outside the cloud or a traditional centralized data center. Analyst firm Gartner predicts that by 2025, this figure will reach 75%.

As the need for speed, efficiency, security, reliability, scalability and versatility of e-governance data grows, it becomes imperative for decision-makers to look at strengthening the e-governance ecosystem through smart and edge data centers that will meet the business expectations through higher service levels and increased user experience.

By Prasanna Sarambale, CEO, Data Center Business, Sterling and Wilson Pvt Ltd.