MeitY Empanelment Opens Oracle Cloud Benefits to India’s Public Sector

Just over a year after bringing the Oracle public cloud to India by establishing cloud regions in Mumbai and Hyderabad, Oracle today announced that it has been named by Ministry of Electronics & Information Technology, Government of India (MeitY) as an empaneled cloud infrastructure solution provider, following a rigorous audit. As a result, governments and other public sector entities in India can now take advantage of Oracle’s second-generation cloud technologies and move their most challenging workloads, including Oracle workloads, to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), helping accelerate the country’s ambition of becoming a 100 percent digitally empowered society and knowledge economy.

Governments of Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Delhi, Haryana, Jharkhand, Karnataka, Maharashtra, Meghalaya, Orissa, Rajasthan, Telangana, Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal and those from more than 29 states and union territories already utilize Oracle solutions. Customers include their various departments like commercial taxes, power (meter data management), social justice (courts), urban local bodies, health, locomotive works and more.

Many government ministries such as Ministry of Corporate Affairs, Ministry of Railways, Ministry of Finance and more also use Oracle solutions. Central government agencies and public sector undertakings like Centre for Railway Information Systems (CRIS), Delhi Metro Rail Corporation (DMRC), Income Tax Department, Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR), Indian Oil Corporation, State Bank of India, National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) etc. have also been users of Oracle technologies for a long time. Additionally, central government projects of Goods and Service Tax Network (GSTN), Unique Identification Authority of India (UID), IceGate, NITI Aayog’s Aspirational Districts Programme and more are also powered by Oracle technologies.

Shailender Kumar, Senior Vice President and Regional Managing Director, Oracle India said, “Oracle has been a partner to India’s development agenda for nearly three decades. Several customers are already experiencing benefits from Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. We have many milestones to celebrate, but today’s announcement gives us innumerable opportunities to help India’s government agencies and public sector organizations really accelerate the speed at which they can embrace digital transformation. We will be ramping up our team to support this growth in our public sector business.”

With today’s announcement, these government entities and public sector organizations will have access to the significant benefits that come from using Oracle Cloud Infrastructure including:

• Simple, predictable and superior cloud price performance
• A fast and simple migration path to the cloud, supported by the only service-level guarantees in the industry for performance, enabling rapid time to innovation. 
• Reliable on-premises-equivalent performance and massive scalability supporting the goal of making more services digital and more easily accessible to citizens and industry
• Powerful and easy to implement security controls with isolated computing environments in compliance with regulatory laws
• Access to Oracle’s Autonomous Database which leverage machine learning and automation to bring increased simplicity, security, and operational efficiency to data management, and also to unlock additional insights
• Protection for existing Oracle software investments with Oracle’s Bring-Your-Own-License (BYOL) policies 
• Ability for governments to maintain an active Disaster Recovery (DR) location and also move significant quantities of data for less – a unique benefit only Oracle can offer

Additionally, entities that are required to follow regulatory guidelines around data sovereignty are presented with a wide choice of deployment options. These range from being able to set up a fully managed, customizable deployment of a public cloud in their own datacenter with the unique Oracle Dedicated Region Cloud@Customer offering to edge devices. With these, public sector organizations can increase the control and governance of their data and operations with simplified and standardized operational policies that can be applied to all workloads. They can also be used to run heterogeneous applications including legacy, cloud-native, data analytics, and high-performance compute (HPC) applications in production, along with greenfield applications and provide access to the full suite of Oracle developer tools allowing them to enhance existing applications while creating and integrating new cloud native applications.

Recently, Oracle along with NIC and IEEE under the aegis of MeitY, invited technologists including students and working professionals, to participate in a 36-hour virtual hackathon, GovTechThon2020. The hackathon aimed to incubate new ideas and display use of technology in prime sectors like education, transport, agriculture – to address grassroots problems India is facing. Majority of the winning solutions were cloud native applications developed using Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.