Govt websites in fire fighting mode

The government of India is working on a structured Business Continuity Planning model to ensure that critical services like the functioning of government websites and servers go on unhindered even when disasters -- man-made or natural.

The model has been devised to recover and restore partially or completely interrupted critical function(s) within a given time period after a disaster or disruption. The government hopes to have this implemented in a year.

Thursday's flooding of the National Informatics Centre rendered most of the Indian government websites with the domain address 'nic.in' -- including the Prime Minister's and President's websites -- inaccessible till about 6 pm.

However, there was no reported data loss because of there being a backup tapes mechanism and its storage area network in the NIC's Delhi unit.

The NIC provides the network backbone and e-governance support to over 3,000 websites of the Centre, state governments, UT administrations, districts and other government bodies.

"To avoid disturbance in the future, we need to work on a business continuity plan," said B K Gairola, director-general, NIC.

While he did not provide any time frame, a government official told Business Standard that the process of the BCP was under way and will be implemented in about a year.

Earlier in the year, the department of information and technology introduced guidelines for technical and financial support for the establishment of state data centres, through which a disaster recovery system will be established and provided by the NIC.

Besides Delhi, the NIC has data centres in Pune and Hyderabad, meant to house mainly Central government data.

The department of information technology intends to set up another data centre in Bhubaneswar to serve the eastern region.

These data centres are connected by high-speed networks to support data/application back-up security.

According to the guidelines, the data centres are required to have a protection and safeguard mechanism for physical security, network security and facility infrastructure requirements including protection against fire, natural calamities, and man-made risks.