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RAILWAYS, CONNECTIVITY AND GOVERNANCE L
MUCH ABUSED OVER THE YEARS, THE RAILWAYS MAY HAVE ANOTHER CHANCE TO CONNECT INDIA— AND NOT JUST PHYSICALLY
ike a lot of people who chug along a nostalgic track at the mere mention of Indian Railways, I also imagine a black chhuk-chhuk engine billowing smoke as it majestically pulls on the sturdy red bogies in the uplifting backdrop of verdant hills. I'm also reminded of an old slogan played numerous times on Doordarshan: Bharat ki rail: hum behtar issey banayein, aur iska laabh uthayein. (Indian Railways: let's make it better and benefit from it.) As we all know, the idyllic image of yore gradually gave way to a realisation that the world's largest rail network also became one of its most burdened, creaky and squalid. What primarily happened over decades was that nobody made it better (not the passengers, certainly not the government) while everybody used and abused it to the hilt. There were a few attempts at betterment, but largely, much of what exists today was built or enabled by the British (with Indians as labourers, true)—with occasional tweaks, tricks and “expansions” by the Independent babus and netas. To me, one of the most useful and significant changes came in customer service through electronic ticketing. (The guys at CRIS have done a humongous job.) So it came as a whiff of fresh air when the Modi government announced its intent and a few ideas to modernise the Indian Railways and make technology a driving force for that endeavour. Among the things that the PMO has suggested are Wi-Fi connectivity on all passenger trains in three months and the use of closed-circuit television for monitoring cleanliness (in addition to security, of course). Earlier in July, the government had announced a Diamond Quadrilateral of high-speed trains (that some in the media referred to as semi-bullet trains!) The most important announcement, in my own view, concerns the mandate for different but allied ministries and departments to work together (highways, water resources, transport, etc.) As most people in IT know, silos are often bad for agility and performance—and governance couldn't be any different. In another positive sign last year, RailTel, the telecom arm of the Railways, launched Railwire broadband service in certain areas of the country. Around the launch, RailTel MD RK Bahuguna had said that it is designed to provide “an open source content delivery platform for providing various services, including broadband internet, eHealthcare and eEducation,” among others. Imagine what Modi & Co could achieve if they were to expedite the process and get the maximum out of RailTel's 50,000 or so kilometres of fibre optic network: for the benefit of the Railways; for the sake of better and wider Connectivity; for what is the raison d'être of Governance—benefit of the masses. Maybe it's time to dream a different dream. sanjay.g@expressindia.com
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contents
India’s leading forum to exchange pioneering eGovernance ideas just concluded its 16th edition successfully at Goa. The event was attended by over 100 government and industry leaders from all over India. Presenting our comprehensive cover package...
DAY - 1 Anant Goenka, Goa CM Parrikar set the pace for Tech Sabha | PG 10 Transforming Governance through Social Media | PG 12
DAY - 2 Dell Power Discussion | Pg 16
Schneider Electric Power Discussion | Pg 31
Symantec Power Discussion | Pg 18
A Case for Faster Efficient Storage | Pg 32
Open Data Initiative: Fostering Innovation and Opportunities
The Importance of Project Evaluation | Pg 33 Mobility and Governance- The Secured Way
e-Services to e-Participation – The Changing Goal Post
Cloud for eGovernance | Pg 19
Dell in India and its Commitment to the Indian Market | PG 13
Towards Efficient and Green Document Management System
eGovernance to e-Participation – Enabling Transformation
Security and the Government Sector | Pg 20
Changing Nothing is Risking Everything | PG 14 and more...
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Enabling a Smart Protection Strategy | Pg 34 Creating Defences against Advanced Security Attacks Solutions Beyond Connectivity | Pg 35 Simplifying IT Security for Government Real World is About Serving Real People | Pg 21
Transforming eGovernance through Citrix Solutions | Pg 36
and more...
and more...
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4 REASONS TO SAYGOODBYE TO THE STATUS QUO For those who want the benefits of softwar e-defined networking and network functions virtualisation in a legacy setup, Ethernet fabrics offer a lot of promise
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ETRANSACTIONS = ELIMINATED TRANSACTIONS Sometimes,minimum government can indeed be better governance.Here is how
Interview 44
AJAY RAO
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Head of Cards Business & Pre-Sales, India and the subcontinent, Zebra Technologies
“The smart card and barcode market is expected to reach $1 bn by 2015” 51 45
BRUNO GEORGES Director - Worldwide Application Platforms Engineering at Red Hat
“With OpenShift,you have a platform without any lock-in layer” 52
SRIKANTH KARNAKOTA Director – Server and Cloud Business, Microsoft India
“SQL2014 database as a platform was born in the cloud” 46
in the news 54
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» HP rides high on the ‘New Style of IT’
AUGUST, 2014
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MUMBAI Shankar Adaviyar The Indian Express Ltd Business Publication Division 2nd Floor, Express Tower, Nariman Point Mumbai- 400 021 Board line: 022- 67440000 Ext. 527 Mobile: +91 9323998881 Email Id: shankar.adaviyar@expressindia.com Vol 25. No. 8. August 2014 Chairman of the Board Viveck Goenka Editor Sanjay Gupta* Chief of Product Dr. Raghu Pillai Delhi Heena Jhingan, Pupul Dutta Copy Desk Aditi Gautam Mumbai Jasmine Desai, Bengaluru Pankaj Maru DESIGN National Art Director Bivash Barua Deputy Art Director Surajit Patro Chief Designer Pravin Temble Senior Graphic Designer Rushikesh Konka Layout Vinayak Mestry, Rajesh Jadhav Photo Editor Sandeep Patil MARKETING Regional Heads Harit Mohanty - West Prabhas Jha - North Sanghamitra Kumar - East Dr. Raghu Pillai - South Marketing Team
Branch Offices NEW DELHI Navneet Negi The Indian Express Ltd Business Publication Division Express Building, 9&10, Bahadur Shah Zafar Marg, New Delhi- 110 002 Board line: 011-23702100 Ext. 668 Mobile: +91 8800523285 Fax: 011-23702141 Email id: navneet.negi@expressindia.com CHENNAI Dr. Raghu Pillai The Indian Express Ltd Business Publication Division New No. 37/C (Old No. 16/C) 2nd Floor, Whites Road, Royapettah, Chennai- 600 014 Mobile: +91 9886293667 Email id: raghu.pillai@expressindia.com BANGALORE Dr. Raghu Pillai The Indian Express Ltd Business Publication Division 502, 5th Floor, Devatha Plaza, Residency road, Bangalore- 560025 Mobile: +91 9886293667 Email id: raghu.pillai@expressindia.com HYDERABAD Dr. Raghu Pillai The Indian Express Ltd Business Publication Division 6-3-885/7/B, Ground Floor, VV Mansion, Somaji Guda, Hyderabad – 500 082 Mobile: +91 9886293667 Email id: raghu.pillai@expressindia.com
Shankar Adaviyar Navneet Negi Ajanta Sengupta Circulation Mohan Varadkar Scheduling Rohan Thakkar PRODUCTION General Manager B R Tipnis Manager Bhadresh Valia
KOLKATTA Ajanta Sengupta The Indian Express Ltd Business Publication Division JL No. 29&30, NH-6, Mouza- Prasastha & Ankurhati, Vill & PO- Ankurhati P.S.- Domjur (Nr. Ankurhati Check Bus Stop) Dist. Howrah- 711 409 Mobile: +91 9831182580 Email id: ajanta.sengupta@expressindia.com KOCHI Dr. Raghu Pillai The Indian Express Ltd Ground Floor, Sankoorikal Building, Kaloor – Kadavanthra Road Kaloor, Kochi – 682 017 Mobile: +91 9886293667 Email id: raghu.pillai@expressindia.com COIMBATORE Dr. Raghu Pillai The Indian Express Ltd No. 205-B, 2nd Floor, Vivekanand Road, Opp. Rajarathinam Hospital, Ram Nagar Coimbatore- 641 009 Mobile: +91 9886293667 Email id: raghu.pillai@expressindia.com AHMEDABAD Shankar Adaviyar The Indian Express Ltd 3rd Floor, Sambhav House, Near Judges Bunglows, Bodakdev, Ahmedabad - 380 015 Mobile: +91 9323998881 Email Id: shankar.adaviyar@expressindia.com BHOPAL Navneet Negi The Indian Express Ltd F-102, Inner Court Apartment, 1st Floor, GTB Complex, Behind 45 Bungalows, Bhopal - 462 003 Mobile: +91 8800523285 Email id: navneet.negi@expressindia.com JAIPUR Navneet Negi The Indian Express Ltd S2, J-40, Shyam GHP Enclave, Krishna Marg, C-Scheme, Jaipur - 302 001 Mobile: +91 8800523285 Email id: navneet.negi@expressindia.com
IMPORTANT Whilst care is taken prior to acceptance of advertising copy, it is not possible to verify its contents. The Indian Express Limited cannot be held responsible for such contents, nor for any loss or damages incurred as a result of transactions with companies, associations or individuals advertising in its newspapers or publications. We therefore recommend that readers make necessary inquiries before sending any monies or entering into any agreements with advertisers or otherwise acting on an advertisement in any manner whatsoever.
Express Computer Reg. No. MH/MR/SOUTH-132/2012-14 RNI Regn. No. MAHENG/49926/90 Printed for the proprietors,The Indian Express Limited by Ms. Vaidehi Thakar at Indigo Press, (India) Pvt. Ltd. Plot No. 1c/716, off Dadoji Konddeo Cross Road, Byculla (E), Mumbai 400027 and Published from Express Towers, 2nd Floor, Nariman Point, Mumbai - 400021. (Editorial & Administrative Offices: Express Towers, 1st Floor, Nariman Point, Mumbai - 400021) Editor : Sanjay Gupta (*Responsible for selection of News under the PRB Act.) Copyright @ 2012 The Indian Express Ltd. All rights reserved throughout the world. Reproduction in any manner, electronic or otherwise, in whole or in part, without prior written permission is prohibited.
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India’s leading forum to exchange pioneering eGovernance ideas just concluded its 16th edition successfully at Goa. The event was attended by over 100 government and industry leaders from all over India. Presenting our comprehensive cover package...
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ANANT GOENKA, GOA CM PARRIKAR SET THE PACE FOR TECH SABHA
EXPRESS TECHNOLOGY SABHA GOA 2014 Anant Goenka,Goa CM Parrikar set the pace for Tech Sabha | PG 10 Transforming Governance through Social Media | PG 12 e-Services to e-Participation – The Changing Goal Post Dell in India and its Commitment to the Indian Market | PG 13 eGovernance to e-Participation – Enabling Transformation Changing Nothing is Risking Everything | PG 14 Smart Datacentre Infrastructure: Future is Here! Governance in the Era of Enterprise Mobility | PG 15 10
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Anant Goenka, Wholetime Director & Head-New Media, The Indian Express Limited
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oa Chief Minister Manohar Parrikar addressed the 16th edition of India's leading forum on eGovernance at Radisson Blu Resort, Cavelossim Beach, Goa. Talking to over 100 senior decision makers across several states and Government departments like Indian Railways, the Department of Electronics & IT, National Informatics Centre, CIDCO, Karnataka State Police and many more, he said, “For eGovernance to succeed, people should be e-literate and not illiterate. What’s more, eGovernance is something that happens over a period of time and cannot be done in one shot. Having said that, we have a lot of the basic infrastructure and connectivity in
place and are ready to take it to the next level.” He also spoke about the larger challenge of changing people’s mindsets. Talking about eGov initiatives in Goa, Parrikar said that the state is 100% broadband compliant. He shared the success story of the e-Payment processes and the establishment of Mahitighar – information kiosks across the panchayats in Goa. In his opening note, Anant Goenka, Wholetime Director & Head - New Media, The Indian Express Ltd, said, "For over 80 years, the Express Group has fought for transparent governance. Express Technology Sabha was started with a belief that digitising government will create a AUGUST, 2014
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Anant Goenka, Wholetime Director & Head-New Media, The Indian Express Limited, and Manohar Parrikar, Chief Minister of Goa, during a Q&A with the audience.
participatory environment in India and we must do our part to encourage and facilitate effective and inclusive governance." At the event, Goenka commissioned India's first-of-its-kind eGovernance report to be put out in collaboration with knowledge partners PricewaterhouseCoopers at the next Tech Sabha in Feb, 2015. A special edition of Express Computer and a redesigned web and mobile site expresscomputeronline.com were also launched by Parrikar. Speaking about the challenges to Goa's ambitious IT plans, Parrikar said that one of the roadblocks is the older generation's reluctance to shift to technological changes. Citing an EXPRESS COMPUTER
example, he mentioned that recently, teachers were asked to teach on computers. The government got letters from teachers saying that they were retiring in sometime, so why do they needed to learn it? “People need to break the barrier of comfort level. In one of the schools, in fact, kids were teaching the teacher how to use an iPad. Education can become much better with digital usage. The government is planning to implement software that will be useful for students,” he added. Citing another example, he said, “Some jobs were advertised and applications were invited online. Applicants complained that they did not know how to fill up the forms online.”
In view of such challenges, Parrikar surmised that it will take Goa 3-4 years to become fully eGovernance compliant. In candid interactions with the audience , Parrikar had some interesting points to share. Parrikar said that anyone thinking that e-tendering is not prone to corruption is wrong. “Ultimately, an open platform makes the possibility lower for corruption, but in certain cases it can be a better tool for corruption! IT cannot remove corruption, as the human brain works faster than IT.” Having said that, he was of the view that if the top government officials are well-versed in IT tools and are also vigilant about corruption, they can catch more and more instances of graft down the hierarchy. AUGUST, 2014
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TRANSFORMING GOVERNANCE THROUGH SOCIAL MEDIA Panel discussion on transformational impact of social media in eGovernance and accelerating its usage
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he discussion started off with Raheel Khursheed, Head - News, Politics & Government, Twitter India, talking about how, traditionally, all the things in eGovernance were unidirectional. G S Naveen Kumar, Special Secretary (IT & Electronics), Government of Uttar Pradesh, said, “With social media, even before the news or an incident reaches the concerned person, it reaches the general public. We need a strong social media-based governance, where the information gets disseminated in a faster and efficient manner..” Khursheed went on to ask the panellists if they thought that social media has democratised information? Giving his perspective on this, Anant Goenka, Wholetime Director & Head New Media, The Indian Express Limited, said, “There is no question about it. And if social media is going to democratise governance, the government needs to get more active on social media. This month's issue of Express Computer looks at 16 case studies of how social media is being used by governments around the world. I really hope that by the next Tech Sabha, we have a lot of such cases in India.” Vineet Kshirsagar, Senior Director and Group Head, Public Sector & Government, Oracle India, said that the elections have clearly shown that social media can be a very powerful tool in India as well. Gautam Bose, Ex-Deputy Director General, and Senior ICT Consultant (eGovernance), National Informatics Centre, New Delhi, explained that there has been a circular saying that all government functionaries and 12
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L-R: Gautam Bose, Ex-Deputy Director General, Senior ICT Consultant (eGovernance), National Informatics Centre, New Delhi; GS Naveen Kumar, Special Secretary (IT & Electronics), Government of Uttar Pradesh, Raheel Khursheed, Head - News, Politics & Government, Twitter India; Anant Goenka, Wholetime Director & Head - New Media, The Indian Express Limited; Vineet Kshirsagar, Senior Director & Group Head, Public Sector & Govt, Oracle India
departments need to become social media savvy. Kumar gave an example of how a district in the Bundelkhand region of Uttar Pradesh tackled water issues with help from social media. “The tanks were not getting recharged for a long time. We thought that with the rains coming soon, we will start a Jal Bachaao abhiyaan to rejuvenate the lakes. We started a Facebook page and asked local pradhans and rojgar sevaks, who would take photos of these lakes and tanks daily and send them across. We created a digital diary that stored these photos, geo-tagged to monitor the work that has happened,” he explained. This helped the administration to be better informed and take the necessary steps to improve the water situation.
Khursheed of Twitter India raised a very important point about the government trying to regulate the use of social media and asked, “Where do you see the regulation landscape going?” Goenka, in reply to this, said that, ironically, the onus will be on legacy media like the Express Group to ensure that regulation does not go overboard. Khursheed concluded the discussion, saying, “The Internet is governed by Moore's law, which says that every two years, your computing power doubles and the price of producing this computing power halves. This means that if the government is drafting policies for the Internet usage today, technology is moving at a pace that makes a lot of those policies obsolete.” AUGUST, 2014
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E-SERVICES TO E-PARTICIPATION – THE CHANGING GOAL POST BK Gairola, Mission Director (eGovernance), the Department of Electronics and Information Technology (DeitY), speaks on centralised service delivery platform
B BK Gairola, Mission Director (eGovernance), the Department of Electronics and Information Technology (DeitY)
K Gairola, Mission Director (eGovernance), the Department of Electronics and Information Technology (DeitY),started off talking about the change from control-centric to development-centric governance has led to the demand for e-services in India. Gairola further said that the three pillars of governance — the Legislature, the Executive and the Judiciary—were focused on the speedy implementation of citizen-facing government services. However he also observed, “Across all
the States and Union Territories, there are multiple establishments and multiple channels for delivery of public services that need immediate attention.” As a solution to this, Gairola called for a centralised service delivery platform for services s . Furthermore, talking about the standardisation of disparate information structures across various state departments, he said, “The focus should be to unify diverse and disparate systems and structures into a unified, secure and scalable cyberspace.”
DELL IN INDIA AND ITS COMMITMENT TO THE INDIAN MARKET Ajay Kaul, Director and GM, North Geo, Dell India speaks on automating government processes with Dell solutions
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Ajay Kaul, Director and GM, North Geo, Dell India EXPRESS COMPUTER
jay Kaul, Director and GM, North Geo, Dell India, said that several government processes have gotten automated and become faster over the past few years.. He said that a lot of government organisations in India are using technologies from Dell on the desktop, server, and storage side for their IT needs. Talking about the capex and opex of IT equipment in the government sector, Kaul said, “You need to look at how much are you spending on buying certain infrastructure, and how much will be the
opex for running and maintaining the infrastructure.” Talking about legacy systems he said that the opex needed to invest in skilled workforce to keep these systems running will be higher. There might not be much of buying here, but maintaining these systems will be costly. Kaul recommended that orgnanisations should go for a solution from a single vendor that integrates all the various components of the IT infrastructure, rather than buying equipment from different vendors and trying to make them work together on their own. AUGUST, 2014
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EGOVERNANCE TO E-PARTICIPATION
– ENABLING TRANSFORMATION
Lalit Gupta, VP, Public Sector and Education Industries Business Unit, Asia Pacific and Japan, Oracle Corporation, on e-Participation
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Lalit Gupta, Vice President, Public Sector and Education Industries Business Unit, Asia Pacific and Japan, Oracle Corporation
alit Gupta, Vice President, Public Sector and Education Industries Business Unit, Asia Pacific and Japan, Oracle Corporation, started the session saying that, “Cities and towns can be made smarter, safer, only through citizen participation. E-participation is all about allowing the citizens to participate in government services and policy making in an efficient and transparent manner, “ he said. He further said that it is also about tapping into the citizens' pulse on social media, blogs to get better and instant feedback in terms of what do citizens feel
about the government services. “Once this feedback is in, you have the ability to make changes to your policies dynamically and deliver the services in a lot more consistent manner, Gupta said. Talking about why social relationship management is important, Kaul said that today if there is a fire or a terrorist attack, a citizen is more likely to turn to social media to talk about it. Gupta also talked about the need for policy automation and analytics, which would provide the ability to understand the impact of changes to policies before they are made.
CHANGING NOTHING IS RISKING EVERYTHING Barun Lala, Director, HP Storage, speaks on converged storage platform
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Barun Lala, Director, HP Storage 14
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arun Lala, Director, HP Storage, started the session stating that converged storage is transforming the industry. “For organisations adopting different kinds of architecture, need to look at the infrastructure that simplifies this task,” he said. He then spoke about HP's 3PAR system. “It eliminates distinction between Midrange and Tier 1,” he added. Speaking on the archiving, Lala said that HP Storeall archive family is integrated with HP’s OneView solution, and depending on the scalability of product one can monitor and manage the
entire solution on one single console. “With SDS, HP is getting into next level of specialisation. Autonomic, efficient, open, polymorphic are pillars of software defined storage,” he said. According to him, in 2014 flash tiering will become mainstream and an expected baseline. He added that flash optimised arrays will be replacing the market. “In VDI or low cost analytics, there is adoption of flash optimised arrays, because density of disk has increased and cost has decreased. The cost per GB has come down,” Lala further said. AUGUST, 2014
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SMART DATACENTRE INFRASTRUCTURE:FUTURE IS HERE Amod Ranade, GM- Data Centre Business, Schneider Electric, talks about energy efficient data centres
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Amod Ranade, GM- Data Centre Business, Schneider Electric
he session began with Amod Ranade, GM- Data Centre Business, Schneider Electric, stating that the ride in emergence of cities is in turn escalating the global energy consumption. Ranade said that lot of trends suggest geographically that there is a fast-paced mushrooming of data centres happening and India is poised to become one of these destinations from where cloud services can be delivered. “Data centre market is becoming fragmented in a way. As large data centres are growing, so are the small ones ,” he said.
Ranade posed a question: how can we ensure that we do not cook our planet? “The answer is consume green and consume low carbon. However, neither approach can really help and that is where the challenge lies. There is no clear direction that there is renewable source of energy becoming available, he said. “We need to build new an energy efficiency paradigm, as a continuous improvement programme. Data centres are not projects by themselves. It’s an assumption and that is where the problem starts,” Ranade concluded.
GOVERNANCE IN THE ERA OF ENTERPRISE MOBILITY Akash Saxena, Director, Samsung Enterprise Business, gives an insight into usage of Samsung solutions in government
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Akash Saxena, Director, Samsung Enterprise Business EXPRESS COMPUTER
kash Saxena, Director, Samsung Enterprise Business, in his presentation talked about how Samsung is working with various government organisations in India. “Airport authority of India is using video walls, based on Samsung display solutions, which capture CCTV footage from multiple cameras and helps the security personnel monitor the airport, he said. “The Indian airforce uses its own communication network. Samsung is supplying the air force custom designed devices which can only access air force
networks. Other devices from other networks cannot see or contact these devices on their network, as these devices operate over an isolated network,” Saxena explained. Saxena added that the company spends close to 10% of its revenues on R&D. Talking about the security aspect of mobility, Saxena highlighted Knox, a mobile security feature built into Samsung phones. According to him, if a binary code running on a Samsung phone is suspected to be malicious or corrupt, Knox will make sure that the binary code does not execute on the phone. AUGUST, 2014
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DELL POWER DISCUSSION EXPRESS TECHNOLOGY SABHA GOA 2014
Dell Power Discussion on challenges in implementing eGovernance projects and how to overcome these
Dell power discussion | PG 16 Symantec power discussion | PG 18 Open Data Initiative: Fostering Innovation and Opportunities Cloud for eGovernance | PG 19 Towards efficient and green document management system Security and the Government Sector | PG 20 Simplifying ITSecurity for Government Real World is About Serving Real People | PG 21 Securing an eGov infrastructure Secure The Breach: AProactive Approach To Data Security | PG 22 Driving a strategic vision in Governance IP Surveillance Solution - Top 10 Things to Look out for | PG 23 eGovernance Service Delivery | PG 24 Harnessing Efficiencies in the Data Centre | PG 25 Building AGovernment Cloud | PG 26 The Need for Stronger Access Control and Authentication | PG 27 Samsung power discussion | PG 28 Canon power discussion | PG 29 Ensuring Stronger Security | PG 30 16
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jay Kaul, Director & General Manager, North GEO, Dell India Pvt Ltd, flagged off the power breakfast by sharing the idea of this discussion: To understand the challenges in implementing eGovernance projects and how to overcome these challenges. A delegate from NIC explained that if we looked at the initial computerisation process, the purpose was to automate whatever was happening manually. With increase in our knowledge, various eGovernance programmes, and newer technologies, we tried to look at how we can use IT further to provide better results. There has been a lot of efforts going on towards process engineering to
make the systems more efficient and optimised. However, he observed that even as the systems were being built up, sometimes the basic infrastructure would be lacking. Another challenge is that in the government, people in particular positions keep on changing. Therefore there has to be perpetual capacity building at the ground level. Localisation of content is also very important, he said. At this point, Kaul asked, “How do you think can these challenges be resolved?” One delegate remarked that, to address the challenge of basic infrastructure, efforts are on to provide connectivity at the gram panchayat level. Mobility is providing the additional connectivity AUGUST, 2014
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Left: Ajay Kaul, Director & General Manager, North GEO,Dell India Pvt Ltd, in an insghtful discussion with delagtes on creating an automated model for business processes to enable transparency
thrust. Also, some of the local content is being pushed through mobiles. When the discussion veered towards optimising costs, Kaul said that one needs to look at cost effective systems where the value of the system comes from the whole life-cycle of the product and not just the initial purchase. Another delegate said that the basic challenge is the time and cost overruns in government projects. Often, it is the external factors that can cause cost overruns. Time overrun could be due to incorrect estimation of the time required to complete a project. However, a major challenge is lack of ample support from suppliers for maintenance of the systems. Sharing the process of hiring solution providers or consultants, one delegate said that his organisation starts giving advisories right from project inception through to implementation stages. However, he noted that the signing off on the design phase is a challenge because the user department is not IT savvy. “We look at how the solution can be mapped EXPRESS COMPUTER
best to the requirements,” he said. It was observed that decision making in government happens at many levels— so one roadblock and the project is delayed. The major problem is business process automation. “Unless your business processes are automated, you cannot use IT effectively,” remarked an attendee. Kaul then asked those present, “How do you create an automated model to enable transparency in the system?” He remarked that IT automation, as a whole, will enable speed and transparency in executing projects. What an automated system does is that it shows up certain approved vendors that a government organisation or department can go to. It also shows how much it will cost to buy a product from each vendor, so the decision maker can budget it accordingly. They can also know the timelines for delivery, and can order accordingly. And if a particular person is not there, they can delegate someone to look at this process. Another delegate observed that there
is lack of skilled manpower in government departments, especially below district levels. “We hire some consultants from MahaVikas or MahaOnline but skill is still a challenge,” he said. Further, there is a lack of information sharing among government departments. There is no common platform, due to which an implementation in one department will not talk to or integrate with another project in another department. Another major challenge, according to a delegate, arises because there is no managed service provider approach. As a result, when equipment is delivered, it gathers dust for a long time before it is put to use. Also, there is no tight or binding SLA to terminate a contract— nor is there a back-up plan when that happens. It was suggested that one should have a just-in-time project plan, wherein the equipment gets delivered when it’s needed and not dumped in advance in case the project gets delayed or is stalled for some reason. AUGUST, 2014
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SYMANTEC POWER DISCUSSION Symantec Power Discussion on protecting data on endpoints and network and dealing with latest data security threats
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he discussion started with Symantec stating that the current priority of organisations is to secure and protect their data. However, data is to be treated differently when it is on endpoints as opposed to the network. Symantec then spoke about its product Veritas, which is a storage management software. It is not only about storing data, but also about understanding how to make it agile. Through this solution, one can migrate from one platform to another, seamlessly and with minimum downtime. In general, organisations do not treat all data equally. Some of the data might require platinum class service. Symantec recommended its product Enterprise Vault for it. For example, institutions like the RBI that require to archive data for longer periods of time, fit into this criteria. Government delegates had queries in terms of how to integrate different elements and how to find something on meta-data, which might be required later and might be critical. Through its information fabric, Symantec said, they can choose different combinations of keywords. Symantec then spoke about leveraging security in the softwaredefined data centre and how to separate the control plane from the data plane. Since these are pretty tightly married, there is not much scope for change. With software-defined solutions, however, there is no need to go after the device at all, but to go after the plane. The element of securing the control plane is very important. A single box running different virtual machines (VMs) requires 18
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Paul Gollamudi, Chief Information Security Architect, Symantec India speaking to delegates on taking care of data security in virtual environment.
different levels of security. There were queries raised as to how to enforce different security policies for all VMs. Can a guest malware jump out and infect other VMs? Symantec answered that it is possible when inter-VM transfer is happening and is trusted. Symantec raised a question to the IT decision makers whether they have a clue as to who is creating the VMs and for what purpose? With hardware one can sanitise and see that it is compliant. But with VMs there is no inventory. Virtual admin might not be talking to network or storage admin. If there is KVM virtual machine, Azure VM or VMware virtual machines, they will not have the same controller or hyper-visor. In some cases, there will be databases and applications running on the same platform. Traditionally, a box to box communication can be monitored. If an organisation does not trust inter-VM traffic at all, it can keep databases in the military zone and applications in DMZ.
But when it is in a service provider setup, there is no need to spread virtual machines into multiple security domains. Lastly, Symantec asked the delegates what their organisations want to do with the data. Do they want to classify it, store it, archive it, protect it and while doing all of it, how do they plan on securing it? There are multiple users having multiple access rights, so how to classify things when in a virtual environment? The session ended with a delegate wisely commenting that a vehicle is a vehicle that functions as a whole and takes you anywhere you want— but it’s not the same with IT because of different vendors not talking to each other. (The Symantec comments in the discussion were contributed by two Symantec India executives: Paul Gollamudi, Chief Information Security Architect, and Digvijaysinh Chudasama, Director of Sales for Government & Defence.) AUGUST, 2014
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OPEN DATA INITIATIVE: FOSTERING INNOVATION AND OPPORTUNITIES BN Satpathy, Senior Advisor, Planning Commission, Government of India, on government’s Open Data Initiative
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BN Satpathy, Senior Advisor, Planning Commission, Government of India
N Satpathy, Senior Advisor, Planning Commission, Government of India, opened day two of Express Technology Sabha with a presentation on the government’s Open Data Initiative. The initiative seeks to create an online portal through which various government departments can share their non-sensitive data that was created using public expenditure for the benefit of citizens. The policy for this was formulated in March 2012, called the National Data Sharing and Accessibility Policy (NDSAP). According to Satpathy, open data can be used to further the cause of key
attributes of eGovernance such as the ‘minimum government, maximum governance’ mantra, accountability, efficiency and trust. Currently, there are 7,764 data sets across various government departments, out of which the Planning Commission alone has contributed 1,014. It is a one-shop window for integrated information on what the government has done and is doing. In another couple of years, when any citizen wants the data to evaluate the government on the basis of transparency, this information will be available and helpful.
CLOUD FOR EGOVERNANCE Dinesh Parekh, Sales Consulting Senior Director, Oracle India, speaks on Oracle’s cloud initiatives and its relevance in eGovernance
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Dinesh Parekh, Sales Consulting Senior Director, Oracle India EXPRESS COMPUTER
inesh Parekh, Sales Consulting Senior Director, Oracle India, began the session stating that organisations have gone from complete centralisation mode to complete decentralisation. In such a scenario, what should be the organisation’s approach to the cloud adoption in the government? Can IT cloud be an option? Organisations can build cloud around infrastructure, platform and Saas. Parekh then delved into offerings by
Oracle. Oracle offers service on application, platform and infrastructure level. The first step for organisations is to look at where they can consolidate. Conventional hardware does not necessarily give higher I/Ops. Oracle has enabled it. Data cannot move to the public cloud unless there is a great foundation of data integration technologies. In some cases, virtualisation is good and in some clustering is good. AUGUST, 2014
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TOWARDS EFFICIENT AND GREEN DOCUMENT MANAGEMENT SYSTEM K. Bhaskhar, Senior Director, OIS, Canon India, talks about eco-friendly measures government can take in printing
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K. Bhaskhar, Senior Director, OIS, Canon India
n his presentation titled Green Technology and Lower Carbon Footprint, K. Bhaskhar, Senior Director, OIS, Canon India, talked about how the government could adopt ecofriendly measures for their printing and document requirements, and contribute to reducing the overall carbon footprint. Bhaskhar explained as to how Canon offered printing solutions that were based eco-friendly in nature. He gave an example of the company’s printing equipment and said, “Canon uses numerous types of recycled plastic in exterior housings and other product parts. The recycled plastic is
sandwiched between layers of virgin plastic..” “The plastics used on our products are biodegradable. In India, about 150,000 products are being consumed every year. If we do not have proper disposal mechanisms and the product isn’t biodegradable then it can create a problem.” He highlighted the need for the adoption of managed print services in the government. Finally, stressing on the importance of digitisation, Bhaskhar said that if all government documents were digitised, it could prevent the data loss incidents.
SECURITY AND THE GOVERNMENT SECTOR Paul Gollamudi, Chief Information Security Architect – India Region, Symantec, speaks on IT security threat scenario and what government needs to know
P Paul Gollamudi, Chief Information Security Architect – India Region, Symantec, 20
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aul Gollamudi, Chief Information Security Architect – India Region, Symantec defined cyber risk as one of the top three risks. Governments are becoming victims of cyber sabotage, cyber espionage, hacktivism and citizen ID theft. Talking about Symantec’s collection of intelligence on cyber attacks, Gollamudi said, “Last year was an year of mega breach. For each breach the amount of data lost is high. In 8 out of top 10 attacks more than 10 million identities were breached.” Gollamudi also gave a perspective on
what cyber attacks in the future would be like. He pointed out that attack trends will go to the Internet of Things-based devices such as baby monitors, smart TVs and even cars. Talking further about the security scenario in the government sector, Gollamudi said, “Security today is expensive. Integration is thin and complex.If attackers are getting organised into an ecosystem, why cannot government agencies do so,” Gollamudi said, leaving a thought for the audience to ponder upon. AUGUST, 2014
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SIMPLIFYING IT SECURITY FOR GOVERNMENT Vishwa Bhushan Jha, National Sales Head – Govt & Defence, Cyberoam, speaks on enhancing network security
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Vishwa Bhushan Jha, National Sales Head – Govt & Defence, Cyberoam
he session commenced with Vishwa Bhushan Jha, National Sales Head – Govt & Defence, Cyberoam, stating that the role of the CIO in government organisation is as taxing as their counterparts in the private sector. He mentioned that consolidation is required at the network security level. Organisations need scalable and flexible security, without adding additional investments. Centrally managing the entire portfolio is becoming important for every
organisation. Speaking on its product specifications, Jha said that Cyberoam provides support even in regional languages. “There is migration assistance available. We offer Layer 8 identity security available, on-appliance web application firewall, and ISO20000 certified customer support. Cyberoam is the first UTM vendor to achieve ITIL compliance for the global support. We were the first to find flaw in the Facebook authorisation, which could likely have triggered malicious attacks,” he said.
REAL WORLD IS ABOUT SERVING REAL PEOPLE Venkatesh Swaminathan, Country Manager, The Attachmate Group (Novell), talks about Novell’s usage in government
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Venkatesh Swaminathan, Country Manager, The Attachmate Group (Novell) EXPRESS COMPUTER
ccording to Venkatesh Swaminathan, Country Manager, The Attachmate Group (Novell), these days organisations have to reach billions of people in different languages, which can be overwhelming. Swaminathan gave testimonials of Novell usage in government organisations. According to Indian Air Defence establishment,“With Novell Groupwise there has been no down time for our mail and messaging solution for past ten years.” Groupwise works on Linux and Windows. According to IT procurement (Tamil
Nadu government) that uses Suse Linux desktop and server, “With Suse Linux enterprise environment there is no worry about viruses. This used to be a real concern. It is easy to deploys well. We have 60000 desktops and 5000 servers in all government schools across the state.” The session ended with more examples of Novell use-cases. Key PSUs in the oil and gas sector use Suse for SAP applications. Novell suite offers file management suite, identity manager, access manager and service desk. AUGUST, 2014
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SECURING AN EGOV INFRASTRUCTURE Kapil Awasthi, Senior Consultant – India & SAARC, Check Point Software Technologies, says that the growing IT usage by the government implies greater security risks
K Kapil Awasthi, Senior Consultant – India & SAARC, Check Point Software Technologies
apil Awasthi, Senior Consultant – India & SAARC, Check Point Software Technologies, in his presentation, talked about how eGovernance will scale at a steady pace, thereby giving lesser time to organisations to react to threat scenarios. He explained that today governments are a key target for cyber attacks. Explaining that these attacks are getting more organised,Awasthi said, “Just like in a physical war, cyber war has reached a stage where recces have started happening.” According to him, to counter these
attacks, an organisation would need to know everything about its network, users and data to decide the steps it can take towards protection. “Organisations can gather intelligence from external agencies like CERT, vendor clouds, social media, and analyse and co-relate this information to determine how it can affect the organisation.” Talking about Check Point’s role in the ecosystem, Awasthi said that the company plays the role of an active informer that can collect the contextual matrix from across critical junctures and provide it to a national control room.
SECURE THE BREACH: A PROACTIVE APPROACH TO DATA SECURITY Anubhav Tyagi, Senior Solution Specialist – India & SAARC, SafeNet, talking about the growing security threat scenario and latest trends
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nubhav Tyagi, Senior Solution Specialist – India & SAARC, SafeNet, took to the stage talking about the security threat scenario. According to Tyagi, while security expenditure has increased in organisations, attacks continue to happen. He said that even enterprises share a similar view. “66% security professionals believe they will suffer a breach within 3 years. 95% are investing in same data security technologies,
while 35% believe they’re investing on wrong technologies,” said Tyagi quoting a study. He further said that 74% believe perimeter defence is effective. Tyagi also said that sole perimeter security is no longer enough. Insider threat is greater than ever, and breaches will happen. According to him, organisations need to determine what data in the data centre is sensitive, while what can be shared publically. AUGUST, 2014
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DRIVING A STRATEGIC VISION IN GOVERNANCE Arijit Chakraborti, Regional Head - Sales, Dell India, talks about infrastructure management challenges and how they can be overcome with integrated solutions
A Arijit Chakraborti, Regional Head -Sales, Dell India
hakraborti commenced the session stating that the government needs to build infrastructure keeping in mind the pace of IT. Sharing some key statistics, he said that 70% of IT leaders expect to see a significant or complete IT overhaul in the next three years and 11 TB of data will be generated by mobile devices by 2016. “Along with with these changes, there are challenges in terms of cyber security, manageability, availability, reliability and TCO. Dell is innovating towards how converged and intelligent infrastructure can be achieved in a much simpler way—
right from end-user devices to critical applications,” he said. Speaking on end-user computing, he said that Dell has Venue tablets, and Latitude notebooks and ultrabooks. “Dell has a wide range of offerings of RAMbased servers, blade servers, and nextgen PowerEdge compute platforms,” Chakraborti added. Lastly, touching upon storage, he mentioned that Dell has fluid data architecture. Among the brands Dell owns in the storage and backup space are EqualLogic, PowerVault AppAssure and Quest.
IP SURVEILLANCE SOLUTION TOP 10 THINGS TO LOOK OUT FOR Piyush Garud, GM - Solution Consulting, D-Link (India), gives an overview of the key considerations when implementing surveillance
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Piyush Garud, GM- Solution Consulting, D-Link (India) Limited EXPRESS COMPUTER
arud started off saying that IP surveillance is the buzzword of the industry. But are organisations really getting ROI out of it? He said that IP surveillance is beyond camera. “D-Link has solutions in Ethernet connectivity, PoE switch, Analogue to IP converter, video management system and storage solutions, and monitoring options,” he said. According to him the top 10 things to look for while designing a solution are: objective, solution scenario, connectivity – wired vs wireless, quality of service,
bandwidth planning, storage selection sensors, alert management, video wall, designing principle and response management. For bandwidth management, he suggested that organisations should always do an audit in terms of bandwidth usage. “There is usually a huge difference between planned bandwidth and actual bandwidth usage,” Garud said. He concluded by mentioning the need for proactive surveillance, including “computer-based actions like phone calls, emails and SMS.” AUGUST, 2014
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EGOVERNANCE
SERVICE DELIVERY
Lalit Kumar, Business Technology Architect, CA Technologies, on monitoring data centre components effectively in different evolving models
Lalit Kumar, Business Technology Architect, CA Technologies
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alit Kumar, Business Technology Architect, CA Technologies, started the session by talking about the data centre evolution. “While earlier, the applications were being used only by the government, they are now being used by the users as well. There were only mainframe kind of solutions earlier. We have slowly moved towards distributed computing. Things are going into high density, with 40 servers in a single box. Data centres have moved to a modular or cloud environment wherein monitoring is a very important component,” he said. He said that organisations need to find what to monitor, how to monitor (what is root-cause, who is the culprit, how to remediate). The speaker then said that sometimes users are not able to access a
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certain application. “Problem resolution is too often very slow. There are lot of interlinked components that need to be understood, which monitoring solution shows,” he said. He also asked how did organisations typically plan data centres? “Traditionally, there are handwritten files, random design, excel sheets, chosen SI. It leads to unplanned growth, irregularities, mismanagement, and underutilisation. As a result of it, breakdown happens gradually. Organisations need to have real-time data centre planning. Complete analysis, capacity and inventory management can be done through this CA system. It has direct ROI in terms of energy and also increases PUE and avoids potential risks,” he said.
Kumar also said that, over the next five years, organisations will increasingly need to do capacity planning for their requirements. Capacity management is designed to improve migration and consolidation initiatives. While moving towards virtualisation, organisations need a tool to understand what is the resource utilisation. “While planning eGov services, there is lack of API testing, difficulty in managing environments across multiple concurrency releases. Because of which, delays happen in releasing an application. It is necessary to look at enterprise DevOps solutions. The speaker ended the session on a note that governing eGov services at right time with right value can be enabled with CA solutions,” he concluded. AUGUST, 2014
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HARNESSING EFFICIENCIES IN THE DATA CENTRE Power Panel Discussion on challenges and possibilities of making data centres more efficient and resilient in the midst of constant change
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he power panel discussion on Harnessing Efficiencies in the Data Centre started off with Parmod Kalia, GM - IT, Punjab Urban Planning & Development Authority (PUDA), talking about how every state has its own state data centre today and its departments have their applications hosted in these data centres. According to him, IT in government has gone from a centralised model to decentralised, and now back again to centralised with these data centres. The focus now should also be on deriving greater energy efficiency while building the processing and storage capacities. Subhomoy Bhattacharjee, Deputy Editor, The Indian Express, was of the view that the challenge the government sector faces is efficiency at the people level. According to him, there is a lot of thought required in building an infrastructure that suits the organisation’s requirements while being energy efficient. However, most of the infrastructure is being built on ideas that are handed down and applied without much thought. Amod Ranade, General Manager Data Centre Business, Schneider Electric, on the other hand, was of the view that his company had a very positive experience interacting with the government sector over the last one year, in terms of the approach towards data centres. Ranade said that traditionally, the evaluation criteria in the government sector for choosing a technology for a data centre was purely based on capex. He went on to highlight the fact that EXPRESS COMPUTER
(L to R) Subhomoy Bhattacharjee, Deputy Editor, The Indian Express, Amod Ranade, General Manager - Data Centre Business, Schneider Electric, Shyla Andrews, Head – IT, CIDCO, and Parmod Kalia, GM - IT, Punjab Urban Planning & Development Authority, during the panel discussion on making data centres more efficient.
today PuE levels are getting specified in RFPs and even government organisations want to know partial load PuEs and how efficiency can be maintained. However, he also observed that even today, efficiency improvements are seen as projects; instead they should be seen as a continuous improvement process. . Taking another view on efficiency, Kalia of PUDA said that energy saving is also relative to the storage cost. According to him, government organisations are making storage decisions based on process or application requirements and raised a question for the panel and the audience: Have we thought about power requirements for that storage? According to him, planning is the most critical part of building a data centre and this is where organisations often go
wrong. Once they acquire machines and the applications, it is then that they think of building a data centre. Kalia believes that government organisations need to apply more thought to planning parameters such as database and storage requirements and the associated storage spends. Ranade mentioned that a data centre is designed to run for 10 years or more. Therefore the focus should be on building something that can cater to the changing demands. The panel also discussed other factors that can help improve energy efficiency in a data centre, such as using virtualisation, smart cooling techniques such as hot and cold aisle cooling and raising the operating temperature for the data centre. The panel also briefly touched upon initiatives such as incentivising IT usage based on energy efficiency. AUGUST, 2014
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BUILDING A GOVERNMENT CLOUD Power panel discussion on GI Cloud (MeghRaj), challenges surrounding it and what is the way forward
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he panel discussion on MeghRaj or GI Cloud began with CSR Prabhu, Ex-Director General, National Informatics Centre, explaining that MeghRaj was envisaged, conceptualised and drafted by a combined committee from DIT and NIC. Not just NIC’s data centres but close to 35 state data centres together would form the MeghRaj cloud. This would be a huge infrastructure of 150 data centres of which 100 were national data centres, the remaining being state data centres. On the network side, the National Information Infrastructure (NII) 2.0 is being conceived for the future where all of India’s major networks such as NKN, SWAN, etc would integrate to create a single, next-generation network. NOFN would also be integrated with the NKN. To which Sanjay Gupta, Editor, Express computer, asked: At what stage of integration are we in? Prabhu said, “We have a large 40,000 sq. ft. data centre in Delhi. It hosts the majority of Government of India applications. Once this data centre reached its peak capacity, we looked at the national data centres in Hyderabad and Pune; now, the national data centre at Bhubaneswar is still a work in progress.” Gupta then asked BB Tiwari, Director, ERNET India, as to how ERNET, the education and research network of the government, fits into MeghRaj. Tiwari said that around 28 schools are connected into ERNET and accessing educational applications. “We plan to connect all the Kendriya Vidyalayas across the country into this network,” he said. Gupta observed that a lot of government projects remain at pilot or
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(L to R) BB Tiwari, Director, ERNET India, CSR Prabhu, Ex-Director General, National Informatics Centre, Piyush Gupta, Associate Vice President, Capacity Building & Knowledge Management, NISG, and Sanjay Gupta, Editor, Express Computer, during panel discussion on GI Cloud
planning stages and asked Piyush Gupta, Associate Vice President, Capacity Building & Knowledge Management, NISG: “What is required, say, from a capacity building perspective, to take it to the next level?” Piyush Gupta said that as a part of NeGP itself, a conscious decision was taken by DIT, “Today we have so many silos available, that we can look at those as pilots. The same will be the case for GI Cloud,” he said. On the question of cloud skills within government departments, Piyush Gupta explained that the level of understanding among employees about cloud and its usage are relatively low. “A department wants to know how do I come on board with a cloud. They would be waiting for these guidelines,” he added. Prabhu had a different take and said, “As far the state governments are
concerned, guidelines have been given a long back that the state government applications have to be moved to the state data centre. SDCs are funded by DIT and most of them are operational and state departments have shifted their applications.”Prabhu further added that the SaaS layer is where the government is lagging behind. The discussion then shifted to the timelines for completion of the data centre projects. Prabhu explained that the data centres are almost ready, and the government has completed almost 20% of the process. Backward integration with NKN is now being envisaged under the NOFN Government User Network (GUN). “NKN stops at the district level, whereas NOFN starts at the block level, and we’re now looking at bridging this gap with GUN,” he said. AUGUST, 2014
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THE NEED FOR STRONGER ACCESS CONTROL AND AUTHENTICATION CA Technologies power discussion on its solutions for better access control and authentication
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he power discussion with CA Technologies was focused on access control and authentication. Lalit Kumar, Business Technology Architect, CA Technologies, talked about the solutions that CA offers that can help government organisations ensure better security for their departments. Talking about the company’s Access Control solution, he said, “You can even put a policy saying that I don’t want this portion of data to be touched by anyone— be it a network administrator or database administrator.” Answering a delegate’s question on two-factor access control, Kumar said that there are multiple ways to implement two-factor authentication, such as soft tokens . Every time a user logs into the machine, this code could be sent to his mobile device. As a user is always likely to carry a mobile device, he can easily enter the password. Another delegate wanted to know about the compatibility of CA’s access control solution with a database that is running on a particular platform. Kumar explained that their solution is independent of the platform. The delegate further wanted to know as to how CA’s solutions would integrate with a legacy application. “We have something called Layer 7 that can help you build the APIs to connect to the legacy applications. We create a layer such that the legacy application will have the necessary APIs to connect to other applications such as identity management,” Kumar said. He said that Layer 7 can help determine and resolve these issues. For instance, if a connection EXPRESS COMPUTER
Lalit Kumar, Business Technology Architect, CA Technologies, speaking on IAM for better security.
is opened to a database, what is the kind of information that can go out? Who are the users that can log in, how many sessions can I create? The solution can help provide strong authenticated access to the database of critical applications.One of the delegates asked as to how the solution can protect against an insider breaking into the system. Kumar explained that with Access Control, even if someone tries to breach into the application with credentials and tries to make changes to the application, the agent will not allow it. “Even if the user has the permissions to make the changes, a policy can be applied that the changes won’t reflect until 48 hours after they’ve been made. You can also put in place a policy that one particular piece of data cannot be changed by anyone for a certain timeline. If someone tries to make
changes, those changes have to go through the necessary hierarchy for approvals, the approvals have to be communicated to the Access Control agent, and only then will the changes be applied,” he said. Another spokesperson from CA observed that 70% of the security breaches happen from within the organisation. Kumar of CA added to this and said some of these happen intentionally while others can be unintentional. Many a time it so happens that a government official has left that department but his credentials are still active. Identity management can act as a user life-cycle management solution by making sure that a complete log of a user’s activity is maintained, from the time he joins to the time he leaves. On leaving, his credentials can be removed fromthe system. AUGUST, 2014
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SAMSUNG POWER DISCUSSION Samsung Power Discussion on innovative usage of devices for eGovernance
The Samsung team in discussion with deleagtes on importance of services and service support for devices that government buys.
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he Samsung team started the discussion by sharing ideas on the usage of devices. For example, India can do what is being done in Singapore, in terms of RFID tags being tagged to vehicles etc. The team then questioned the delegates on how important are services and service support for devices that they buy? The delegates mentioned that quality is sometimes a little compromised. It was suggested that applications need to be built to beautify the city. The idea of evoting was explored. However, e-voting has to be platform- and deviceindependent. They also mentioned that any development effort requires money. Samsung said that it can help its developers. The delegates also
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mentioned concerns about proprietary platforms. According to one delegate, they had certain departments running on the Oracle platform; however, when they had to migrate it, there was a problem. There are certain applications for which it is not problematic to choose a proprietary platform, but it is not for everyone. The delegates suggested that there is a big opportunity in areas like woman and child development. The Samsung team mentioned that it is not only a device company but also has services to offer. Having said that, an improvement of the device improves services as well. Recounting their experience with another vendor, Dell, the delegates said the biggest problem with Dell was services. But now, Dell not only provides
appropriate service but also gives two free replacements a year in case of any problems. Samsung then asked them what was their future need and where can Samsung help. According to delegates, they want a robust device that lasts for a long period of time. Data collection at the field level is where mobile devices are of much use. Another usage will be for the government staff to look at the data on phones and tablets. Speaking on the next flood of innovation, the Samsung team said that the company will be unveiling foldable phones, which will be a big game changer. According to Samsung, mobiles and laptops are not substitutes for each other. The discussion concluded with the Samsung team stating that imagination is the only limit. AUGUST, 2014
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CANON POWER DISCUSSION Canon Power Discussion on eco-friendly printing, digitisation and MPS
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Bhaskar, Senior Director – OIS, Canon India, started the discussion by saying that organisations do not necessarily have to print everything. He said that Canon ensures that its machines are ecofriendly. Some of the parts get recycled, so they do not have to manufacture new ones. Canon helps the environment in other ways as well. In some organisations, for instance, printers are on 24/7. What Canon does is automatically put them in the sleeping mode when they are not in the running mode. According to Bhaskar, a Canon printer consumes 10 watts as opposed to a comparable printer from another vendor, which consumes around 22 watts. Organisations also face the problem of a lot of unclaimed prints. Unclaimed printing is reduced by a mechanism in which the printout comes only after the person walks over to the printer and authenticates the command right at the printer. Also, if someone does not take the print for, say, 5 hours, then it can be cancelled. “We have a single chip design, so the same RAM is used for printing and scanning etc. Some organisations, to maintain confidentiality, give small printers to individuals, but it is a very costly proposition,” said Bhaskar. The discussion progressed along the topic of feature-packed printers such as those with mobile printing or Wi-Fi printing capabilities. At this point, Bhaskar lamented that most organisations do not spend enough time evaluating the printers. “Indians have the habit of going for the lowest quote. The government should entrust a job with some high level of SLAs,” he said. EXPRESS COMPUTER
K. Bhaskar (right, in foreground), Senior Director - OIS, Canon India, listening to delegates' views during the Canon power discussion
It was suggested that too many features or specifications of printers also creates a lot of confusion among user organisations. A lot of investments go waste because many of the features in printing are not even used. The discussion then moved to digitisation and scanning. Presently, the government wants to dispose of all physical files by scanning them and saving the documents in digital form. But how likely and practical it is? Some examples were cited. Kerala government has scanned the entire land record and property documents from the original. They have also taken print-outs, but they have also kept the original documents in case they are needed for legal purposes. The Gujarat archival department also scans and keep documents. There is information existing even from British times. With file and letter movement happening in all ministries, scanning has a
huge scope. Digitisation is for faster retrieval of old documents. One delegate remarked that Adobe has said that anything that is stored in PDF1 can be retrieved only for 99 years. The regular PDF cannot be opened after some time. Some delegates highlighted the service issues they were facing with Canon printers, complaining that some of the products were not as simple to use and the supplies such as cartridges not as easily available as for HP. This is particularly a big issue in remote areas, for instance in the North East. To this, Bhaskar responded that Canon has a nation-wide service network and supports such far off places as Leh. On the question of comparison with HP, he quipped that perhaps Canon is a company with very superior products that is not really as good at marketing as some of its competitors. AUGUST, 2014
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ENSURING STRONGER SECURITY Check point Software Technologies’Power Discussion on building security for new government projects and roadblocks around it
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armeet Kalra, Head of Strategic Accounts at Check Point Software Technologies, started off the power discussion by asking the delegates about the kind of changes and new projects that they would be seeing in their respective departments. He also asked as to what challenges do the delegates foresee and how Check Point can help resolve some of them. A delegate observed that the use of IT will increase once government applications start getting delivered. That is when people will realise that we need better security. Security components such as firewalls are deployed but we still have a doubt whether the security measures implemented are effective enough. He further said that though government departments have SLAs, they are not able to clearly define their security needs and therefore his department decided to give out RFPs in the form of use cases. Another delegate said that their department is looking at creating a development environment for mobile applications and they would need product support to ensure better security for these apps. A delegate from the West Bengal government said that there is an increasing need for mobile security and there should be policies in place to ensure security and privacy of mobile phone users. Phaniraj Shekhar, Head – SEMT, Government of Rajasthan, asked, “Data centre issues can happen both from an efficiency and a security perspective. Are we equipped with the necessary training on using the resources?” he asked. He was of the view that there is need 30
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Harmeet Kalra, Head of Strategic Accounts at Check Point Software Technologies, in discussion with delagtes on their present security challenges.
to ensure that government websites pass basic levels of security testing following which cyber security tools can be deployed. There is also a need to train users to equip themselves to handle such tools. Another delegate added that as per the Department of Electronics and Information Technology (DeitY) guidelines, all security testing applications need to be tested and verified. Shekhar observed that though their websites were tested by certain certified vendors, there were still vulnerabilities that allowed attacks such as SQL injections, phishing, etc. He said that RFPs are being sent out to hire solution architects, testers and quality assurance teams. Another delegate felt that there is a need to define cyber security standard across states so that all websites and
applications can be gauged, say, on a scale of 1 to 4, from being least to most secure. Moving further, another delegate observed that states are mostly reactive from a security perspective. Also, applications are not stable in their initial stages and many a time, such applications get certified. These certificates should not be perpetual. He was of the view that security certificates should not have a life more than six months, and applications should require to go through security audits at least every six months. A spokesperson from Check Point observed that security needs to be built in from the time the application is being developed. This entire process involves building, testing the infrastructure and training the user on these security measures. AUGUST, 2014
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EXPRESS TECHNOLOGY SABHA GOA 2014
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SCHNEIDER ELECTRIC POWER DISCUSSION Schneider Electric discusses the need for energy conservation and its latest solutions for data centres
Schneider Electric Power Discussion | PG 31 A case for faster, efficient storage | PG 32 The Importance of Project Evaluation | PG 33 Mobility and governance the secured way Enabling a Smart Protection Strategy | PG 34 Creating Defences against Advanced Security Attacks Solutions Beyond Connectivity | PG 35 Transforming eGovernance through Citrix solutions | PG 36 Safety in Cyber SpaceDeveloping trust in egovernance | PG 37 Security awareness and policy enforcement | PG 38 Panel Discussion on Managed Services- Evolving a framework | PG 39 A Holistic View on Security (Trend Micro Power Discussion) | PG 40 EDITOR’S AWARD FOR EXCELLENCE IN eGOVERNANCE | PG 41 EXPRESS COMPUTER
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he discussion began with the Schneider team taking the delegates through the history of Schneider Electric and its different line of businesses. “The company focuses a lot on energy conversation. It has solutions that help in implementing renewable energy. It has building management solutions, called Smart Structure, which gives a common platform,”the team said. Schneider Electric has transformers for delivering the power at various voltage levels. Managing energy at medium voltage (132 KVA to 11 KVA). medium voltage distribution. Conserving energy is becoming a priority and in future, organisations also might have energy managers and energy heads. The conversation furthered as delegates explained their concerns over reducing space, safety, poor network quality, theft and inefficiency. Another challenge that CIOs face is in terms of battery and there is no
space as well in the data centre to keep them. Schneider Electric suggested that to be kept in very cold or very hot temperature. Schneider has battery management system from APC. The battery is monitored at the cell level and charged differently. Battery monitoring is also done remotely for 10 or 5 KVA. Battery monitors have GPS communication, which is connected to the command centre, through which early warning is possible. They also have a software to monitor the power usage remotely. In Madhya Pradesh, this solution has been deployed in the SWAN. Schneider has power management system that runs between utility grid and the customer. DCs can be run on solar energy, but only there will be need for an alternate source in the night. The discussion ended with the topic of Smart GRID., wherein the grid regenerates its power and send it back to the utility. In areas where power usage is very high, this is being done. AUGUST, 2014
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A CASE FOR FASTER, EFFICIENT STORAGE HP power discussion focusing on HP's 3PAR storage offerings, current storage needs and challenges
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t the HP Power Breakfast, Barun Lala, Director, HP Storage, started off by talking about a recent rate contract that the company has signed with NIXY, which includes HP’s products in an RC that allows HP to directly offer products to the state departments. He then talked about how HP’s 3PAR storage has gone ahead of IBM’s storage offering. It has been the fastest product for HP, giving the company US$ 25 million revenues in 2013. The company predicts that this product range will cross US$ 40 million in 2014. The company has seen significant uptake in the government sector, with 25 APDRP projects using their offerings. Lala further talked about converged storage, and said that, “Converged storage is autonomous, efficient, federated, open and polymorphic.” By having a storage offering that is open, Lala believes that it brings down the cost of ownership. Calling software defined storage a buzzword, Lala said, “Within software defined data centres, you will see proliferation of software defined networks and software defined storage.” Lala explained that software defined storage is independent of any hypervisor offering from the various virtualisation technology vendors. Lala then talked about different departments having different performance and response time requirements. With Quality of Service (QoS), based on the user requirement, you can enable the system to perform the task within that required response time. Irrespective of the size of the
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HP power discussion in progress over the topic of HP 3PAR, SSDs and latest offerings from HP which can help government organizations.
deployment, according to Lala, HP’s storage offering comes bundled with all features. Lala further explained that the company’s storage solution is independent of backup software. The company’s Store One Catalyst, builds the orchestration layer that understands, and provided the balanced performance for a particular environment. Lala also talked about company’s StoreAll big data analytics solution that allows an organisation to scale up to petabytes of data and also supports OpenStack and integrates with HP’s OneView. Lala further informed that each of HP’s Proliant servers today ships with One TB VSA license. A VSA license allows a data centre administrator to monitor storage in all locations, consolidate unused storage space and manage storage requirements better. Talking about the growth of adoption
of solid state drives (SSDs), Lala said that in the next few years, the shipment of SSDs will account for 50% of overall storage drive shipments. He observed that SSD solutions from competing vendors such as EMC do integrate effectively with traditional hard disk drive based boxes because their operating systems are different, and organisations require multiple monitoring mechanisms to manage these solutions in a centralised manner. He also claimed that HP’s 3PAR storage solution offers five times more SSD density within a rack, in comparison to vendors such as IBM. Answering a delegate’s question about cost of SSDs, he said that over the last few quarters, they have been available in capacities of 400GB and 900GB. HP themselves launched a 1.9TB SSD a week before this discussion at Technology Sabha. Today, SSDs cost $2 per GB, as opposed to $50 per GB nine months ago. AUGUST, 2014
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THE IMPORTANCE OF PROJECT EVALUATION Piyush Gupta, Associate VP (Capacity Building & Knowledge Management), NISG, speaks on how to optimally evaluate and assess eGovernment projects
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iyush Gupta said that the essence of eGovernance is to reduce or minimise the pain areas, and all eGovernance projects look to achieve these objectives. “However, the expectations of every state and every stakeholder within the state who will be accessing that application, are different from each other, and therefore a thorough evaluation of the project requirements is very important,” he said. Gupta said, “What you want to achieve and measure will define your project requirements. To do this you must define clear measurable outcome, how do you want to implement it, with what resources.” Gupta further explained that evaluation is something that does not end as soon the project starts. It is necessary for every government organisation to re-evaluate at every stage of its project to determine if they’re on track. “If our eGovernance project outcomes are not Specific Measurable Achievable Realistic and Time-bound (SMART), we cannot achieve them, nor can we assess or evaluate them.” Gupta was also of the view that in case of any project, the project is defined to improve efficiency, transparency, accountability, but the question is: how do we measure these? Another question was what do we monitor in eGovernance projects and what do we evaluate? The problem in this case according to Gupta was that eGovernance projects are focused on monitoring and not evaluation. Explaining this problem further, Gupta said, “Some key issues
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If our eGovernance project outcomes are not Specific, Measurable, Achievable,Realistic and Time-bound (SMART),we cannot achieve them,nor can we assess or evaluate them. start right at the conceptualisation of project. If assessment has to be done, today it’s done with a feedback form. There is no standard framework available. We don’t have base line data for our services. Today there is a lack of visibility into assessment reports.” He explained that a lot of times, there is an apprehension that the outcomes cannot be quantified. However, there are techniques that can be used to quantify non-tangible outcomes. Gupta also said that while there are frameworks available, such as the EAF 2.0 (eGovernance Assessment Framework IIM Ahmedabad 2004), there are issues in adopting one model for everyone. He explained this with an example and said, “Should land records in Karnataka be evaluated on the same outcome
Piyush Gupta, Associate VP (Capacity Building & Knowledge Management), NISG
indicators as of Manipur and Delhi? Or should each project have objectives, outcomes and indicators specific to that state. Can we define additional set of evaluation indicators for similar sector of projects or stakeholders?” Furthermore, over a period of time, the outcome will get changed or enhanced. Gupta put a pertinent question before audience: Can we provide online assessment tools for on going self assessment for project owners so that they do not have to wait for an external body? He was of the view that as more and more people use this tool, the repository of benchmarks and outcomes will increase and others can look at it for reference during project design. He concluded by saying that the government need to look at the project evaluation process from a holistic perspective. AUGUST, 2014
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MOBILITY AND GOVERNANCE THE SECURED WAY Sunil Lalvani, MD, BlackBerry India, speaks on secure mobile communications and BlackBerry usage in government
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Sunil Lalvani, MD, BlackBerry India
alvani commences the session by stating that there was an urgent need for secure mobile communication. “Mobile malware is real and incidents of state snooping incidents are on the rise, and India is the 6th most frequently phishing attacked nation in the world,” he said. Explaining about MDM, he mentioned that BlackBerry has been using MDM for about 10 years. Focusing on eGovernment, BlackBerry can securely manage multi-platform devices and tablets. “BES10 server scales upto 30,000 users. Security can be bifurcated right at the core through BlackBerry balance feature. BlackBerry is the lowest cost
option based on a five-year TCO,” Lalvani explained.. The session ended with examples of the BES10 usage in the government. “One out of six police officers in UK uses BlackBerry;13 out of 14 ministries are using BlackBerry 10. Blackberry postNSA spying reports, secured voice and data for the German government. In the last year,10 of the G20 governments started using this solution. BlackBerry was given certificate from the US department of Defence to operate.There are lot of e-Governance applications available — for instance, data collection, GIS, crisis management and surveillance,”he stated.
ENABLING A SMART PROTECTION STRATEGY Richard Sheng, Senior Director, Enterprise Security, APAC, Trend Micro Inc, speaks about advanced targeted attacks and solutions
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Richard Sheng, Senior Director, Enterprise Security, APAC, Trend Micro Inc 34
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he session commenced with Sheng stating that presently three forces are changing threat landscape — consumerisation, cloud and virtualisation, and cyber threats. Speaking on APT, he said that it has advanced beyond existing controls. He later introduced the concept of waterhole attacks wherein organisations need to deploy end point compromise assessment technology and file integrity monitoring technologies. The session furthered with zero day
exploits. “Organizations need to limit access to everything in the network and make it harder for attacker to move laterally,” he said. Speaking on their product, he mentioned that Trend Micro’s Deep Discovery product has an open architecture. The session ended with the speaker posing a question to delegates on whether they had an incident response team? Nobody did. He mentioned that the lack of it is very common. But in an age of targeted attacks, it is very important to build it. AUGUST, 2014
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CREATING DEFENCES AGAINST ADVANCED SECURITY ATTACKS Alison Higgins-Miller, Vice President, Asia Pacific, Websense, gives an insight into the changing scenario in data security
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Alison Higgins-Miller, Vice President, Asia Pacific, Websense
lison Higgins-Miller, Vice President, Asia Pacific, Websense, started off by talking about how security is a business issue. Citizens reach out to the government for public services and the government also stores a lot of citizen data within its organisation. She stated, “Therefore, citizens will be interested in knowing what’s happening to the data the government is responsible for.” Higgins-Miller talked about how the global threat scenario is changing and said, “Today, states are interested in other states. There has been a 100 percent jump in cyber attacks. Close to 78 government websites have been attacked
until June 2014. It’s not unique to India.” However, she also pointed that the number of physical threats went down last year. Higgins-Miller said, “It is not about security issues anymore, it’s about human behaviour. Forensics is not enough anymore. We have to get smarter and predictive.” Talking about the lack of integration among the various security tools that an organisation ends up deploying HigginsMiller opined that the industry is in a migration period where we will go from point solutions to integrated solutions. “The focus will shift from compliance to IP protection being the primary driver for data security,” she said.
SOLUTIONS BEYOND CONNECTIVITY LV Sastry, Business Head and Sunil Rathi,AGM,New Product Development, Aircel Enterprise Business, talk solutions beyond connectivity for eGovernance initiatives
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LV Sastry, Business Head, Aircel Enterprise Business EXPRESS COMPUTER
V Sastry, Business Head and Sunil Rathi from Aircel Enterprise Business, in their presentation talked about the government needs for enterprise grade connectivity. Reiterating this view, Sastry said, “Connectivity is one of the important pillars from a resource perspective for the success of eGovernance projects.” The company according to Sastry provides data services to over 10,000 organisations. Sastry and Rathi also talked about how the the near future will be based on Internet of Things and every person will own seven or eight SIM cards that would
connect various machines and help them communicate with each other. They gave an example of M2M finding application even in government sector. Chennai Tax Corp has replaced manual property tax collection with SIM card based machines based on Aircel’s solutions. Furthermore, Aircel also offers mobile data management (MDM) solutions that could help government implement greater security and access control on a mobile device. For instance, “You can enforce government policies such as cameras on employee mobile devices getting disabled once they enter defence premises.” AUGUST, 2014
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TRANSFORMING EGOVERNANCE THROUGH CITRIX SOLUTIONS Nilesh Goradia, Head- Pre-Sales, Citrix, gives an insight into Citrix solutions and their usage in eGovernance scenarios
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he speaker started the session talking about the history of Citrix and its current major customers like BHEL, HP, EXIM India, NTPC. According to Goradia, management, access, performance and security can be utilised for successful eGovernance. He highlighted that organisations have the right kind of networks, but the concern is if they are capable of delivering those applications? “Citrix addresses key government challenges of IT security, mobility, COOP, Green IT through thin-clients, satellite communications and cloud computing. Organisations should be ready to access the information even in case of a disaster,” he said. He added that IT security has become important in every facet of business of the government. Citrix builds security into the IT infrastructure. It sends only encrypted pixels, keystrokes and screen refreshes across the network. It modifies access privileges based on type of connection. “Citrix solution is secured by design and it allows seamless delivery of applications from application datastore,” he said. Later, he went onto to speak about the application virtualisation and its benefits. “It allows to run applications in more environments, organisations have to update and install and patch it only once,” he said. Speaking on desktop virtualisation benefits, he mentioned that it allows to deliver entire OS on any device “The major Citrix TCO is that it lengthens equipment life-cycle, there is application compatibility and there is management and delivery of a single ‘golden image’. Citrix Netacaler solution 36
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Nilesh Goradia, Head- Pre-Sales, Citrix
delivers web applications faster. It offloads most of the task from the server, so it can do the task of delivering applications only. It has layer 4 load balancing, and can load-balance applications from many criterias. End result is enhanced user productivity. Citrix Netacaler solution can scale150x in three dimension and the same appliance supports higher throughout,”
he explained. He further said that Citrix also has solutions to support MDM through enterprise MDM, IAM etc. He ended the session by speaking about thin-clients. “Thin-clients reduces administrative and energy cost. Organisations can convert desktops and laptops into thin-clients and its life-cycle can be extended to seven years,” he added. AUGUST, 2014
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SAFETY IN CYBER SPACE-DEVELOPING TRUST IN EGOVERNANCE The panellists in this discussion talk about how citizens can be assured of security when they do online transactions
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he Power Panel on Safety in Cyber Space - Developing Trust in eGovernance through Security began with one of the panellists talking about how how while everything today is coming online, the risks are also rising up. Annual losses from cyber attacks have been estimated anywhere between US$ 300 billion to US$ 1 trillion. One of the panellists, Anil Sagar, Director, Indian Computer Emergency Response Team, New Delhi, observed that before hosting a government website a comprehensive security audit should be carried out. Another panellist was of the view that security depends on a national level umbrella that monitors threats from outside the country, and the second layer where we have to secure the back end so that the critical data and the application does not get disturbed. According to him, it's a perennial problem, where users both intentionally or unintentionally, expose the system to attacks. The first two layers are being managed quite well, the third is an issue because of lack of awareness. Subhomoy Bhattacharjee, Deputy Editor, The Indian Express, was of the view that India is a country, where 1.2 billion people will be interacting with the government. And they will increasingly be interacting through the internet. They will depend on government services and expect them to be delivered. Applications are coming up and people are accessing the system. This is creating a big risk. Hacking a government website gives mileage like no other. One of the panellists in the discussion was of the view that when it comes to
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(L-R)Anil Sagar, Director, Indian Computer Emergency Response Team, New Delhi; Vijay Devnath, General Manager (Infra & Security), Centre for Railway Information Systems (CRIS), Ministry of Railways; Sanjay Gupta, Editor, Express Computer; Subhomoy Bhattacharjee, Deputy Editor, The Indian Express speaking on safety in cyber space
data, it can be manipulated/ tampered or stolen. Checking and updating security is cat an mouse game. Today you patch something, a hacker will exploit something else tomorrow. Vijay Devnath, General Manager (Infra & Security), Centre for Railway Information Systems (CRIS), Ministry of Railways, explained that Railways is a big recruiter. almost 66,000 people are recruited every year by Railway recruitment boards. They have now taken the e-recruitment way. According to Devnath, there are people who have created a fake website and collecting fees through it. By the time people find out, the attackers run away with the money. The awareness among the people applying for jobs through e-recruitment is low and even though
newspapers have talked about such bogus websites, it hasn't helped. Another panellist observed that though government systems are going online, and there are measures in place to secure data, a normal user cannot distinguish between fake and real sites. There are digital certificates but people have managed to create fake certificates too. Continuous monitoring has to be done to find out if such fake websites exist. He was of the view that defence has a separate network. It has to be air gapped. But to say that air gapped networks cannot be broken into is wrong. In case of breach of defence systems, data was stolen by exploiting human psychology. The data was of PSUs that support defence. AUGUST, 2014
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SECURITY AWARENESS AND POLICY ENFORCEMENT In this discussion, the panellists talked about the growing need to spread awareness and enforce policy.
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he third day of Technology Sabha also witnessed an interesting panel discussion on The Growing Need for Security Awareness and Policy Enforcement that focused on the need for better security and policy mechanisms in e-Governance and government departments. Sanjay Sahay, Additional DGP, Police Computer Wing, Bengaluru, Karnataka State Police, opened the discussion by saying that the biggest asset which we have today is information and we need confidentiality, availability and integrity of the information to be protected. B N Satpathy, Senior Advisor (E&F/S&T), Planning Commission, Government of India, said that the 12th five year plan has six focus areas on security, and awareness building is one of them along with skill development. According to him, J Satyanarayana, was a key architect in building the policy framework for cyber security. One of the key ingredients of this policy was that there should be a massive program to spread awareness about security. Prashant Chaudhary, Director, Government Sales, CA Technologies, another member of the panel, giving his perspective said, “From an e-Governance perspective, we need to understand who are the primary consumers of the environment such as citizens who connect to the applications and department employees who access information.” Government has started opening up APIs to not just other organisations, but also private companies to develop applications. According to Digvijaysinh Chudasama, Director - Sales 38
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(L to R): Subhomoy Bhattacharjee, Deputy Editor, The Indian Express; Nilesh B. Fal Dessai, Director (IT), DIT, Government of Goa; Neeta Shah, Director (eGovernance), Gujarat Informatics Limited, Government of Gujarat; Digvijaysinh Chudasama, Director - Sales (Government & Defence), Symantec India; Prashant Chaudhary, Director, Government Sales, CA Technologies; BN Satpathy, Senior Advisor (E&F/S&T), Planning Commission, Government of India; Sanjay Sahay, Additional DGP, Police Computer Wing, Bengaluru, Karnataka State Police discussing cyber-space and security.
(Government & Defence), Symantec India, “A government organisation should look at: What is your security posture today and how many of your employees are aware of it?Let's have an assurance level instead, where the security team can give the organisation, the users an assurance that we are securing them.” Dr. Neeta Shah, Director (e Governance), Gujarat Informatics Limited, Government of Gujarat, pointed out, “In a government, when we talk about security, security is not a product or a problem. It is a process, and in the government environment, this process takes a bit longer.” Another member on the panel, Nilesh B. Fal Dessai, Director (IT), DIT, Government of Goa, was of the view that in government departments, projects happen in a piecemeal manner, with every department having it's own project.
There is no centralised architecture. Subhomoy Bhattacharjee, Deputy Editor, The Indian Express,, was of the opinion that security should be commensurate with the level of the threat and not with what we think. Giving the example of railways were developed in the country he said, “They got the lines in place, they got the systems running and developed best practices along the way.” Sahay agreeing with perspective concluded and said, “We are not denying the fact that attacks on government are not from a monetary point of view, it is only to prove a point so far. We have not come across an NSA level of attack within the government department or not yet discovered one. Execution of policy is an issue. However, it's a matter of time and as the next generation takes reigns of governance in the country, the situation will change.” AUGUST, 2014
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PANEL DISCUSSION ON MANAGED SERVICES:EVOLVING A FRAMEWORK The panellists in this discussion emphasise the growing adoption of digitisation in government and how Managed Services can help
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he panel commenced the discussion by stating that e-transactions are no longer electronic transactions, they are 'eliminate transactions'. Maharashtra government has abolished affidavits, because of which the number of transactions have gone down dramatically. Government creates demand for these certificates and Government, gives these certificates. This is where managed services comes in. From January to June, Government of Maharashtra moved from managed print services to managed services. The panel compared having a reliable relationship with a managed service partner with a safety locker in a bank. “It is the duty of the government to reduce the pain-points for citizens,” panel said. Right now, not many field offices know about managed print services and the awareness needs to be brought in. There is a project called meSeva in Andhra Pradesh wherein millions of records are kept with digital signing. One project envisaged by the BJP government is of National e Library where all books are covered and everyone can access those. There was a point raised by the panel that managed services works well in private sector, it may not be feasible in government due to various reasons. Firstly, it is a change issue of ‘this is my printer and that is your printer’. Also, overall it is a change management issue. The biggest challenge is the accountability part. If a vendor is paid too much, it makes people look bad. Government is content if the asset is owned by the government and not the EXPRESS COMPUTER
(L-R): Sanjay Gupta, Editor, Express Computer; Rajeev Tiwari, Director - OIS, Canon India; Alok Sharma, Head, SeMT, Government of Haryana/NISG; CSR Prabhu, Ex-Director General, National Informatics Centre (NIC); S Chockalingam, Commissioner – Education, Government of Maharashtra discuss Managed Services
vendor. The panel mentioned that price discovery becomes difficult if there is no past data earlier it was owned by the government and it becomes difficult to give justification for huge amount money paid to the vendor for MPS. Another question raised was that how managed print services and digitisation can go hand in hand. The printing in government is still happening the way it used to happen 25 years ago. They still buy equipment based on sanction
without realising the need. The Capex and Opex model is skewed. Lot of money is given to buy it, but less money is allocated for Opex. It leads to fake inks, low quality toners, which harms the environment and reduces ROI. To control unnecessary usage, one can use accounting software in the system. Canon clarified that there is a study conducted of the usage pattern of the departments, before implementing MPS, and that saves lot of money. AUGUST, 2014
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A HOLISTIC VIEW OF SECURITY Trend Micro discusses latest threats and highlights the need for enhanced security in virtual and cloud environments
Trend Micro team and delegates engaged in a serious discussion on security threats like malware and protecting against it in a virtual environment.
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heTrend Micro power discussion started off with the spokesperson from Trend Micro talking about how virtualisation platforms such as VMware and cloud platforms such as Azure, all can be possible targets of malware today. The company launched its Smart Protection Network in 2008, a completely cloud based security solution. In 2012, it launched the Smart Protection Server 2.0 that combines a database, co-relative technologies to offer protection to server. According to him, a big challenge for data centres is patching of servers. Once a patch is released, an enterprise takes 3 to 6 months to test the patch. Due to the complexity of the infrastructure, the patch is not applied. This leaves the infrastructure vulnerable to attacks. Through Trend Micro’s virtual patching solution, where the patch isn't actually 40
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applied, a virtually patched environment is created where the application can run. The solution collects all logs, does not co-relate, but highlights all the critical incidents that have happened in the data centre. This solution works on the physical or virtualised server. However, the security designed for physical server should be the same as that for a virtualised server. He also talked about the ability to support VMware endpoints as VMware has released the APIs that allow integrating with the end-points. However, according to him, Microsoft has not made APIs available that allow integrating with Hyper-V. We can also integrate with AWS. “Singapore G Cloud based on HP has made APIs available through which we integrate with the orchestration layer. The user can not only provision a server, but also provision the security for it through our solutions,” he explained
Talking about their efforts, Trend Micro spokesperson said that they are conducting workshops to create user awareness in a few states such as Orissa and Maharashtra. The spokesperson then went on to talk about a spear-phishing attack in South Korea wherein the initial penetration took place eight months ago. It exploited a local anti-virus solution. 20th March was War anniversary for South Korea. The attacks exploited an organisation's anti-malware software to plant a virus into the network. On March 20, the malware executed, sent out a boot sector virus to all computers in the office and the systems crashed on boot. It is suspected that it may have been a nation state to nation state attack. This brought the infrastructure down, it could have an impact on the company, or the economy too. AUGUST, 2014
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EDITOR’S AWARD FOR EXCELLENCE IN EGOVERNANCE The Editor’s Award for Excellence in eGovernance was introduced for the first time at this year’s Technology Sabha to honour distinguished personalities for their long-standing contribution to the field of eGovernance and ICT development in India. On the awards night, Anant Goenka, Wholetime Director & Head - New Media, The Indian Express Limited, sat down for a quick chat on eGovernance and related issues with the three very special winners this year: R Chandrashekhar, President, Nasscom; J Satyanarayana, former Secretary, DeitY; and RS Sharma, Secretary, DeitY. Here are some edited excerpts from the conversation: during a couple of weekends, what I did was wrote the software code so that people could go on the field and start enrolments.
(L to R) Anant Goenka, Wholetime Director & Head - New Media, The Indian Express Limited; R Chandrashekhar, President, Nasscom; J Satyanarayana, former Secretary, DeitY; and RS Sharma, Secretary, DeitY
Goenka: One recurring theme we come across is that the government is operating in silos. Will it ever change? Satyanarayana: For any large organisation there will have to be some structure. The larger the organisation, the more the silos. These silos make the performance of work more complicated. A lot of government procedures require going to multiple departments. For example, passport has to go to the police. EXPRESS COMPUTER
That is where standardisation makes a huge difference. Sharma: There are silos in government just as there are silos in IT. In fact, IT silos are worse than non-IT ones—and sometimes you have to be hands-on to get things going. When UID started, standards had to be set. The team was taking time in making an interface wherein citizens could feed-in data. So
Goenka: Is it getting difficult to hire technology talent, especially for the government? Chandrashekhar: Well, the answer is yes and no. We have some very talented people in NIC, but it needs to be reinvented. Fortunately, things have changed. Presently, NISG has come onto the scene wherein we created an environment where people could be hired at near-market salaries. A new HR policy was created for the eGovernance team and a two-way channel was created for the industry to work on for a couple of years. Goenka: There is some amount of speculation about the new government keeping a distance from UID. Your comments? Sharma: It is for the government to decide what to do on UID. From the standpoint of policy, it [UID] is one of the best things done in the country. A large number of programmes are aimed at citizens through it. Rs 3.5 lac crore have been put into various schemes. The entire cost of Aadhaar is of Rs 80,000 crore per year, which will give many AUGUST, 2014
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times more in return. This is a project that has been delivered on time, and now we need to leverage it. Goenka: What do you think is the future of UID? Chandrashekhar: The emphasis now has to shift on actual application of UID. Getting the project started at the citizen interface is very important to stabilise it. This will happen when we see more and more applications like banking, telecom, etc using it for verifying user identity. When these large applications start using Aadhaar, then it will stabilise. And once they begin to taste its sheer convenience, it will spread like wild-fire. Sharma: We are going to have electronic services drill. Electronic authentication is needed for the e-delivery of government services. The only eauthentication that is present is Aadhaar. Goenka: Will the BJP be able to put their stamp on Aadhaar? Sharma: It is up to them, but one cannot deliver e-services without eauthentication. User name and password are there, but it is not suitable for, say, pensioners who are old. They can do only primitive way of authenticating, which is thumb impression. [Editor’s note: This conversation happened on June 14, when there were doubts about BJP going ahead with Aadhaar. Of late, however, the new government has indicated that it wants to build on Aadhaar and expedite the process of enrolments.] Goenka: Mr. Satyanarayana, we believe you will be working with Chandrabau Naidu in Andhra Pradesh. What are the plans ahead in this regard? Satyanarayana: From the IT perspective, the development of AP as a whole has been centred around Hyderabad, [but only] 5.5% of IT companies are located there. The 42
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provide final outcome to the citizens.
When large applications such as banking and telecom start using Aadhaar, then it will stabilise. And once they begin to taste its sheer convenience,it will spread like wild-fire challenge and plan is to take this percentage to a respectable figure. There is a lot of expectation about the capability of a person based on what he has done in terms of employment that has been created by him. The canvas of expectation is going to be very big. The mantra pronounced in the last few months is about good governance. For this, we need to break silos at the official and statutory level and create an integrated approach. Only then will governance itself and the country would move in the right direction. Goenka: eGovernance is not necessarily faster or better governance. Your comments? Sharma: It is true. eGovernance does not produce good governance, it can only enable good governance. However, it can also make bad governance even worse. It’s not just about using technology; one has to ready the system for technology and the underlying processes have to change. There needs to be elimination of redundant steps in many cases, without which one cannot get needed results. A high degree of political support and engagement is required, because it will in the end
Goenka: Coming to the question of privacy, do you think citizen privacy is being breached? Sharma: I do not know of any systems that violate the privacy of citizens. Satyanarayana: Right to privacy is a big issue in developed countries. In India, we we were not focusing on privacy, but on getting access to the information that was wanted. Then came the question whether a line needs to be drawn. But people confuse things by looking it privacy from the eyes of developed nations. What is considered privacy in India is different from what is considered privacy in the US. Privacy is a social issue, while breach is a technical issue. It is very difficult to define privacy in India due to the sheer massive landscape and different values. However, we do not have a privacy law as of now. Goenka: Anything you would like to say about the BlackBerry data incident? Satyanarayana: This has been a very sensitive issue. BlackBerry provided such strong level of encryption that the government could not access information when they had to. However, there are many encryption services now which are of this nature. Chandrashekhar: The issue took quite some time to resolve. The debate had to be shifted from a company-specific one. The problem is that today’s technology provides encrypted communication that is not easily penetrable. I have been asked if we are going to ban BlackBerry, but the crux of the issue is different. The issue is, what are we going to do about encrypted communication in today’s world? The government has to learn to work with the private sector. This particular example demonstrated that when we had a constructive conversation, the issue was solved. AUGUST, 2014
EVENT EXPRESS TECHNOLOGY SABHA GOA 2014
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SHOWCASING THE SABHA The 16th edition of Express Technology Sabha was abuzz with insightful presentations, engaging discussions and some lighter moments as well. Here are a few snapshots from India's premier eGovernance forum
From L to R: Anant Goenka, Wholetime Director & Head- New Media, The Indian Express Limited, Manohar Parrikar, Chief Minister of Goa and Sanjay Gupta, Editor, Express Computer launch a special edition on social media in eGovernance EXPRESS COMPUTER
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EVENT EXPRESS TECHNOLOGY SABHA GOA 2014
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Goenka (left) presenting a memento to Parrikar
A chat with the winners of Editor's Award
Getting on-board at Tech Sabha with registrations
The audience at the 16th Technology Sabha is all ears
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EVENT EXPRESS TECHNOLOGY SABHA GOA 2014
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Exhibition booths put up outside the conference hall by different vendors
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EVENT EXPRESS TECHNOLOGY SABHA GOA 2014
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Dancing away at Tech Sabha 16th Edition in Goa
Night of songs
Time for a little play between the sessions
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Women power at the Sabha
AUGUST, 2014
COLUMN
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EDGAR DIAS
4 REASONS TO SAYGOODBYE TO THE STATUS QUO W For those who want the benefits of software-defined networking and network functions virtualisation in a legacy setup, Ethernet fabrics offer a lot of promise
ith virtualisation already taking hold across much of IT, software-defined networking (SDN) and network functions virtualisation (NFV) are emerging as promising solutions to the biggest challenges currently plaguing data centre networking. While some vendors and customers are taking the lead and saying goodbye to their complex, hardware-hindered networks, there is an equally vocal segment of businesses that is perfectly content with the status quo. For these customers, a new infrastructure model must not only deliver the benefits of SDN and NFV, but also support legacy hardware. For organisations reluctant to revamp their network architecture, the following points are a good way to stay focused on the bottom line. 1. It’s all about business agility: Your previous investments in network infrastructures have probably locked your business into a set of functionality and behaviour that cannot be changed until either the next refresh, or until you have had the opportunity to shut things down and perform a major reconfiguration. However, with a software-centric model—combined with an agile, versatile switching fabric—you can make changes that impact the way business gets done without needing to reinvest in the existing technology or refresh the hardware.
With an SDN-enabled Ethernet fabric,both new services and bandwidth can be provisioned in minutes EXPRESS COMPUTER
2. We’ve spent how much? And we need to spend how much more?: Once you start to invest in proprietary hardware and software, you tend to keep spending out of habit. But before you know it, you’re wearing blinders, and unintentionally, you’re limiting the opportunity to drive innovation and
business growth. Network fabrics represent a newer approach that has introduced greater network flexibility (and therefore opportunity), and now even more options have developed with virtualised and open networking technologies. Moreover, greater competition among non-proprietary hardware alternatives will keep prices down, especially when compared to a proprietary approach. 3. Let’s provision that new service—right now: Automating the provisioning of servers changed the way data centres operated. Virtualisation added a new dimension to what could be done during deployments. Extending the same capability to the network only makes sense, as adding new appliances and performing physical reconfigurations aren’t conducive to getting things done quickly. With an SDN-enabled Ethernet fabric, both new services and bandwidth can be provisioned in minutes. 4. We can have it all: Some organisations might be ready to jump feet first into SDN and NFV, but in most cases a gradual transition makes better sense. Selecting the products that support open and software-based network functions will allow you to protect your current investments and prepare for the future, while responding to the dynamic demands and resource requirements of your data centre today. If you want to maximize the future potential of your networking infrastructure, make sure to take SDN/NFV-enabled Ethernet fabrics into account the next time you’re planning a refresh.
Edgar Dias is Regional Director, India, Brocade
AUGUST, 2014
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COLUMN RAJESH AGGARWAL
ETRANSACTIONS = ELIMINATED TRANSACTIONS T Sometimes, minimum government can indeed be better governance. Here is how
There is a need to look at which processes/services can be eliminated.This elimination of transactions can happen in 80% of the transactions a citizen is made to do! 48
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he Central and State Governments are focusing on eTransactions or electronic transactions. Electronic transactions allow citizens to access citizen services conveniently without having to visit Government offices. Services can be accessed either through the Common Service Centres (CSCs) or from one’s home via internet. The eTaal Portal (www.eTaal.gov.in) has also set in a sense of competition among states for providing more and more electronic transactions. While eTransactions have brought in greater transparency into Government functioning and in ensuring better service delivery, but it also runs the risk of processes and services being computerized without assessing whether the service is actually needed and whether it is adding any value to the overall process. So, there is an urgent need to look beyond electronic transactions and see if certain transaction can actually be eliminated instead of being computerized. Herein lies the concept of ‘Eliminated Transactions’. Let us look at an example in the context of education. Every year, students taking admission in Junior College would have to furnish a Domicile Certificate. This leads to a mad scramble among lakhs of students for getting the certificates before the admission process. Let us see how to make this process citizen friendly. SCENARIO 1: Students run around to various Government offices at Tahsil (Taluka) and District levels. They pay to touts to know the procedure, to get the application form, fill up the complicated form and various annexures, go to Taluka Treasury Bank to pay the Government fees by Challan, and then go through a
tout to get the Domicile Certificate, or waste multiple trips and days to get the Certificate. SCENARIO 2: The Government machinery holds special camps (“Government at your doorstep”) with senior officials and the entire decision making machinery present. You go there, stand in long queues, but at the end of the day, you get your Certificate. SCENARIO 3: You go to the nearest CSC (Citizen Service Centre) in or nearby your village, fill up the application form and pay the “facilitation fees”, get a computerized receipt, go back after three to four days, and pick up your Domicile Certificate. SCENARIO 4: You go to the Citizen Services Portal of the Government, fill up the form online, upload your documents, pay the fees by net banking or credit/debit card online, and after a few days, get a digitally signed certificate by email. SCENARIO 5: The Government looks at the problem in a holistic manner and asks the question – Is this certificate needed at all and is it adding any value? So, instead of looking at avenues of computerizing this transaction, the State looks at eliminating the same. Accordingly, a decision is taken that any student who has appeared for the 10th standard examination from the State need not submit a domicile certificate for admission to Junior College. This not only simplifies the process, but results in greater ease and convenience to the students. Thus, instead of going for electronic transactions for every service, there is a need to look at which processes/services can be eliminated. AUGUST, 2014
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This elimination of transactions can happen in 80% of the transactions a citizen is made to do! Who asks for copies of Land Title? In 90% cases, it is the Government (the Cooperative Bank for Farmer Loans, the Stamp Duty Registrar for sale/purchase/rental of properties etc.). And who gives the Land Title certificate? The Government itself. Perhaps a law needs to be enacted, BANNING a Government Department or an Institution to ask for copy of a document from a citizen, if ANY Government department is the custodian of that document. The citizen should just indicate the number (like student roll number, or Land Plot number), and the server to server internal transaction between various government departments should verify and get the details. This simplifies citizens’ life, and makes transactions faster and eliminates frauds. Apart from massive digitization of legacy data, simplification and computerization of processes, standardization of metadata etc, it also needs an easy, verifiable citizen authentication process. This is where eKYC process of Aadhaar will come in handy. For example, Maharashtra Stamp Duty Registration office has allowed people to print Rental Lease agreements from home by filling up a form online, paying fees online, and UID linked online authentication of owner and tenant. No need to go to any government office! Many of you have read my freewheeling Paper “eGov 0.0 – A Primer on eGovernance,” which is available at www.ilovemaths.com/rajesh/egov.pdf. Here are a few extracts from that paper, indicating the need of drastically reducing the paperwork, and simplifying the citizens’ lives: ● Before we start “computerising” any
activity, the first question we must ask ourselves is - should the Government be doing this activity at all (like Octroi)? If we can rise above our narrow department view and take a macro view, or think from taxpayer’s point of view, the answer in many cases would be NO. EXPRESS COMPUTER
Do some dispassionate analysis whether your department or office should exist at all. Does it exist in developed countries? Is it a legacy organ like appendix which has now lost its relevance, is painful to the taxpayer, and needs removal? In that case, rather than think about “computerisation”, think about “closure”. ● The ideal situation is to eliminate ALL
physical interaction of the citizen with the government, replacing it with online systems for payments, SMS/eMail/IVR systems for complaints and Application Status etc., an outsourced computerised Front Desk for submitting or receiving physical papers, and a courier system for delivering papers from Government to citizen. ● There is a GIGO principle (Garbage In,
Garbage Out) in the Computer World. Unless your input and the process is clean, you will not get butter after churning, you will only get garbage (using a mild word here, for fear of censorship). ● Be ruthless. Take out scissors and
chop chop chop your activity. Do what is called BPR (Business Process Reengineering) or GPR (Government Process Re-engineering). Our Acts and Rules frequently need drastic changes—many Acts during British times were made to harass, control, subdue the citizens or to deprive them of legitimate rights. And many Acts
need to change due to the development of new technologies (e.g. introducing options of online payments, digital signatures; transport has moved beyond horses, communication has moved beyond telegraph)...many Acts need to change with the change in attitudes and behaviour over time (e.g. censorship standards, Right to Information, Privacy issues, need to decentralize and deregulate, trust more and inspect less and so on). Are you asking citizens to submit some document in triplicate? Do you ask them to get the Xerox copy verified from a Gazetted Officer or a Notary? Do you ask them for a big sheaf of Annexures (accompanying documents)? Does your Application Form have 100 pieces of information asked, when 10 would be sufficient? Do you give a receipt to the citizen, or can the babudom happily lose papers? Is the payment process simple and convenient, or does the citizen waste one full day and more money in transport than the government fee itself? (Can the citizen pay online or at a shop/CSC near his home, or is he required to waste a day and money going to Treasury Bank for a challan?) Do you give a commitment regarding the time frame in which the citizen’s work would be done? (This is the thing called Citizen Charter). Does the file get approved with just twothree steps, or does it go round and round with twenty Human Touch Points (and a few Monkey touch points if your file is in offices on Raisina Hill)? Can you intimate the citizen of the status of his application by an SMS, email or a phone call? Can you deliver the end result to the citizen in a painless way, at his home or near his home? (Getting a courier at home is better than going multiple times to a government office to get your document – ration card, passport etc.). Can you DRASTICALLY REDUCE and rationalise the existing procedures and make the citizen feel the dignity of living in a democratic country? Rajesh Aggarwal is Principal Secretary – IT, Govt. of Maharashtra.
AUGUST, 2014
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INTERVIEW AJAY RAO ZEBRA TECHNOLOGIES
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The growing fondness for smart cards in the Indian industry has upped the business opportunities for companies like Zebra Technologies. Ajay Rao, Head of Cards Business & Pre-Sales, India and the subcontinent, Zebra Technologies, talk about the company's plans and targets to Pupul Dutta
“The smart card and barcode market is expected to reach $1 bn by 2015” How big is the smart cards and barcode market? India is emerging as one of the world’s largest and fastest growing markets for smart cards. The market size is anticipated to reach $1 billion by 2015. A huge component of the growth is expected to come from the on-going government projects like the RSBY, PDS, driving license, vehicle registration, financial inclusion, toll collection, metro rail projects, etc. Currently, how conducive is the market for smart cards and biometric business? Smart cards are gaining swift popularity in various segments of the industry. The basic reason behind their popularity is ‘transaction tracking’, which has become the need of the hour. With a population of over 1.2 billion in India, the government has put in a lot of beneficiary and regulatory programmes that need smart cards. Card personalisation being a key component of the industry, we have seen a continued increase in demands for our range of products and solutions. These include schools and colleges for student IDs and registration, staff IDs, library records, exam entries, network log-ins, club memberships and cashless campuses. Besides, retail outlets are increasingly adopting staff IDs, cash register log-ins, driver IDs, loyalty cards, accounts cards, gift cards, etc. The BFSI sector has also started adopting instant personalisation of customer cards, micro-banking, e-passbooks, etc. Could you please name some of the projects you are involved in? With a wide range of on-demand card printers, we have been an active component of all the solution domains involving use of cards—from driving licenses and bus passes to loyalty and insurance cards . Zebra card products are being used in various projects under central and various state government projects and initiatives. We have more than 11 states/UTs using our printers for DL/RC applications, including the state of J&K, Chandigarh, etc. 50
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How important is India as a market for Zebra? India is a country of 1.2 billion people and identification and allocation of secure benefits, privileges are the need of the hour. With the government pushing for more automations and cashless transactions, the need for ondemand card encoding and printing is set to grow at a very high pace. Zebra has the right products for the market and with every launch is moving closer to the current growth and needs of the industry.
There is always a security issue attached with smart cards and biometrics. How do you approach the problem? The technology being used by the government for smart cards is pretty advanced. There are enough checks, procedures and systems in place with the best possible security checkpoints. We have a secure range of smart card printers like ZXP Series 7 and Series 8 that can be used to complement the security needs by providing the best covert and overt security features, including secure holographic lamination, on-demand UV printing, secure lock for individual printer, software lock feature and even AES encryption for communication with the printers. Can you please share some future trends about the AIDC and RFID market? The Automatic Identification and Data Capture (AIDC) market, in India and around the world, is fast emerging as an important contributor in helping organisations to manage their operational efficiencies effectively, thus giving a digital voice to assets, people and transactions that provides greater visibility into missioncritical information. The AIDC vertical largely comprises barcode and RFID printer manufacturers, ribbons and labels manufacturers and biometric and EAS (Enterprise Application Service) providers. Customers in India have recognised the importance of tracking, which leads to various components of the AIDC vertical. At Zebra Technologies, we see a huge potential for this market in industries such as healthcare, manufacturing, retail, transport, logistics, etc., as well as the pharmaceutical space in India. For example, in the healthcare sector, the industry is realising the importance of accuracy, safety and efficiency for prescription processing. Zebra’s labelling solutions help address these issues. Some industry studies indicate the current market for the AIDC industry to be around Rs.1–1.2 billion with a growth rate of around 35% every year. pupul.dutta@expressindia.com
AUGUST, 2014
INTERVIEW BRUNO GEORGES RED HAT
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Bruno Georges, Director - Worldwide Application Platforms Engineering at Red Hat, talks to Pankaj Maru about the company's OpenShift platform and its benefits. Excerpts:
“With OpenShift, you have a platform without any lock-in layer” What is Red Hat’s OpenShift platform and how is it beneficial to enterprises? OpenShift is our platform as a service. We are moving towards environments that are not just working offline [but online as well]. It is an onpremise, private Platform as a Service (PaaS) solution offering that meets growing application demands. The OpenShift Enterprise improves developer productivity, increases operational efficiency and expands hardware utilisation. If you want to build an application and present it to a customer here or anywhere across the globe, then how can that be done today? In the old days, you needed a server, a software stack, hardware etc. In a best case scenario, this would take a week. But with OpenShift, you just have to register, write the code, and deploy it directly on the cloud. You don't have to worry about the infrastructure at all, but just have to request for suitable capacity. OpenShift can not only be applied online, but can also be implemented on-premise. In Pune, a large bank has used Red Hat’s PaaS to give the benefit of open source to their developers, saving a large amount of money, especially while going to market. Today we have 1.5 million applications on OpenShift and 20,000 new users registering every week. What are the key benefits linked to the OpenShift platform? There is an openness to integrate technology, allowing us to expand our ecosystem. It allows collaboration, partnership and innovation. The time to market for an application has reduced from weeks to practically a few hours. Earlier, there were many different flavours of Linux. We have removed the ‘lock-in’, so that you no longer have to worry about compatibility. With OpenShift, you have a platform without any lock-in layer. The value therein is to give choice and this openness is in our DNA. It enhances productivity, along with standardisation of the application development lifecycle workflow and enables application service delivery acceleration. This effectively increases the velocity of IT. Being built on a stack of open source EXPRESS COMPUTER
technologies, the OpenShift platform is designed to provide freedom of choice, including the freedom to choose to move off the PaaS. To support this, only unaltered open source language run times and frameworks are used within the OpenShift platform. No proprietary APIs, technologies, or resources are used. This ensures application portability both on to, and off the OpenShift platform, thereby preventing vendor lock-in.
Do you see any challenges for enterprises wanting to shift to an open source platform? From a customer standpoint; we only see opportunities vis-à-vis adopting the open source platform. Migration is not just moving from RBM to JBoss or Weblogic to JBoss; we look at it from a different perspective. Not being able to look at the codes poses tremendous challenges, especially in the event of attempting to move the data.The open source model itself is very beneficial for the enterprise.
What is your vision for JBoss? We work on a different level, and of course we want to stay open. The way open source functions is through contribution from communities, different players and the academia. There is one fundamental difference between closed and open source: while closed source is driven by product marketing, open source is driven by real problems in the industry. For instance, the current innovations around the ‘internet of things’. We want enterprises to unlock the full potential of all their existing and new data assets and gain critical business insights by making all data easily consumable by people who need it. We are working very hard to improve utilisation of data assets, and to help enterprises derive more value from existing hardware and storage investments, complementing existing integration technologies like SOA, enterprise application integration (EAI), and extract, transform, and load (ETL). Globally,which are the regions that are largely adopting open technology? Most of the stock exchanges, including the New York Stock Exchange, are not only using Red Hat Enterprise Linux but moving to the middleware stack as well. Europe is also seeing a high affinity level for the open source model. In Asia, we have been around for about five years and the adoption level is surprising. Bangalore is the number one city in the world to be consuming our technology. At least 250 cities in India and around the same number in China have been using JBoss. Telco, finance and government are the primary industry verticals driving JBoss adoption. pankaj.maru@expressindia.com
AUGUST, 2014
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INTERVIEW SRIKANTH KARNAKOTA MICROSOFT INDIA
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In a discussion with Heena Jhingan, Srikanth Karnakota, Director – Server and Cloud Business, Microsoft India, explains how SQL 2014 promises to help enterprises dissolve data silos and promote a data culture. Excerpts:
“SQL 2014 database as a platform was born in the cloud” Microsoft has now begun talking of developing a data culture for enterprises. How does SQL 2014 help in that direction? Data culture is all about democratising the business intelligence. It basically means that users—whether they are at operations, frontline or backend support—should all be able to analyse the data that is flowing across the system. Now in the digital world, there is a massive data flow happening, so enterprises need tools that are intuitive and simple to use so much so that a sales person should be able to analyse the sales data. Typically, the whole world of data is generally outsourced to data scientists or business analyst experts, whereas we at Microsoft believe that it need not be the domain of the specialists. It should be something that every user in the enterprise would be able to make sense of. When that happen, the data culture sets in. We enable that with our SQL 2014 database platform. It is not just a database; it is a platform completely connected with the cloud and, at the same time, with Excel, which is our way of democratising BI because everyone knows Excel. The data is now not typical tables or rows, it now complex structured and unstructured data that comes from cloud as well as on-premise relational databases like SQL. So this is precisely what we mean by the data culture and how SQL connected to Windows Azure, a cloud platform, and Excel as a client on the front end, makes the data culture happen. If we look at Indian enterprises, the data still resides in silos. How can we talk of democratisation in such a scenario? If you take a typical enterprise, depending on the applications that it is running, the data platform decisions have been in isolation. However, the good news with SQL 2014 is that it can talk to multiple databases—be it IBM's DB2, Oracle or SAP HANA system—and users can query on that as there is an analytics engine that is built into the solution. Also, there is a data cleansing engine built in. The story becomes even more interesting 52
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when you start bringing in data outside your enterprise firewall. For example, one of India's largest retailers discussed with us that it had good overview of their customers, but had no idea about their behaviour outside the shops. This is where big data comes into the picture. We did an exercise with the retailer and used data from the Consumer Survey of India, which is not structured. We have Hadoop, which is a big data platform, that has connectivity to on-premise Azure, and both of them connect seamlessly to SQL database, so we were able to query on all the big data and share some powerful insights with the retailer.
SQL2014 was conceived with cloud design in its principles, designed to work in a hybrid environment. With SQL 2014, enterprises have back-end DR taken care of by Azure.
What new can the enterprises expect from SQL 2014? Broadly, there are three things that enterprises need to remember around SQL2014 launch. First, super high performance and the inmemory capability of the solution gives almost 30-40% performance boost. On the price to performance ratio, we are the leading platform in the county. Our data warehousing solution is the lowest cost across the industry at about roughly $4000 per terabyte. Now that we have connected SQL with Azure so deeply, it has enhanced structured and unstructured data querying, bringing them back into Excel, which is an amazing visualisation tool now with tools like Geoflow. SQL 2014 database as a platform was born in the cloud. SQL2014 was conceived with cloud design in its principles, designed to work in a hybrid environment. With SQL 2014, enterprises have back-end DR taken care of by Azure. Also, we are best suited to run the hybrid cloud as we have the Windows Server, and then there is Windows Azure. Windows Server and Azure are so seamless now that moving virtual machines between a server to cloud and back is like moving files between drives. In fact, the only public cloud platform that SAP and Oracle are supporting is Microsoft Azure. heena.jhingan@expressindia.com
AUGUST, 2014
BUSINESS AVENUES
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NEWS INDUSTRY
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HP rides high on the ‘New Style of IT’
eHealth Centre in Lakhimpur, Uttar Pradesh, India
TO HELP COMPANIES cope up with the transformative changes happening in the IT industry, HP recently launched a string of products and services. According to IDC, the rise and convergence of the four pillars of cloud, social, mobile and big data is having a transformative effect across all industries. By 2020, IDC expects $900 billion worth of spending on ICT in Asia Pacific (excluding Japan), with more than 55% coming from technologies and solutions that drive the four pillars. Organisations are under increasing pressure to respond to this rapid shift and take advantage of what HP calls the “New Style of IT” to transform their operations, improve their competitiveness and enhance customer interactions. At an event organised for the Asia Pacific and Japanese market (APJ Summit) at Mumbai, HP announced, among other things, the launch of new age infrastructure, which includes virtual cloud networking, SDN (software defined networking) application, new data centre switches, and enhancements to existing solutions for automating routine IT tasks and reducing IT operational expenses. In addition, the IT major has also 54
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jumped into advisory services to enable companies to strategise better for dealing with the problem of mobility and related issues.
Taking eHealth to the masses In addition to talking about the New Style of IT, HP is also doing some CSR activities like opening eHealth centres in association with Narayana Health in India. eHealth centres are rapidly deployable healthcare facilities, powered by HP’s cloud-enabled solution. Housed in shipping containers or existing facilities, each eHealth centre is customised and fully equipped with cloud-integrated diagnostic equipment. The company plans to install up to 20 eHealth centres over the next 18-24 months. “Addressing the challenges of providing quality and affordable healthcare to patients in rural India requires a New Style of IT,” said Neelam Dhawan, Vice President and General Manager, Enterprise Group and Country Managing Director, HP India. “HP cloudenabled technology, which is central to eHealth centres, is helping to change the dynamics of the healthcare system in India. By working with organisations like
Narayana Health, we are able to expand the eHC programme to more parts of India.”
Spanning enterprises and consumers While the enterprise segment remained the major focus of the summit, the company also launched some colourful products for consumers, with special emphasis on the youth. HP launched a range of consumer notebook and touch convertible PCs, and a variety of accessories delivering eye-catching options for consumers in India. Besides product launches, HP also spoke about some important deals that it has recently bagged. Shell, to begin with, has extended the hardware and services agreement under which HP supports the oil major’s global business in more than 100 countries and for over 100,000 employees and contractors worldwide. Another important deal the company spoke about was with CIBIL (Credit Information Bureau (India) Ltd) wherein HP will use its converged infrastructure to improve the performance of CIBIL's IT operations and accelerate its business growth. —By Pupul Dutta AUGUST, 2014
REGD.NO.MH/MR/SOUTH/132/2012-14, PUBLISHED ON 28TH OF EVERY PERVIOUS MONTH & POSTED AT MUMBAI PATRIKA CHANNEL SORTING OFFICE, DUE DATE 29 & 30 OF EVERY PREVIOUS MONTH, REGD. WITH RNI UNDER NO. 49926/90