New Delhi: Microsoft has criticised the Centre's proposal to empanel a set of cloud service providers for rendering government services.
Bhaskar Pramanik, chairman of the Indian unit of the American technology company, stated that smaller vendors may not have the capability to run complex projects that big players such as Microsoft, Google and others do.
In an interview to a media house, Bhaskar Pramanik said, "Making a strong pitch for a policy that leverages use of public cloud infrastructure by the government, Pramanik said Microsoft is not suggesting that the entire Aadhaar database be run on its data centers' since it is very critical from a security point of view, but that other non-critical projects can definitely be run through the cloud."
Earlier this week, the Department of Electronics and Information Technology (DeitY) released a request for proposal or RFP for empanelment of cloud service providers for use by departments, in addition to the National Cloud services offered by National Informatics Centre, the government's IT arm, for their e-governance solutions.
"In India they want choice. The government is saying they need to open it up for everybody; now the guys who can play in this are really the big guys. They (smaller players) can't have global footprint," Microsoft India chairman said.
"We are not here to satisfy any particular company," said an official. He said the idea is to create as much competition as possible so that prices fall and one day it could be even possible to offer cloud services for free.
As per RFP, one condition for qualification mandates there should be at least 30 per cent headroom available for any unanticipated spikes in the user load.
Pramanik said that at a recent Microsoft conference which was attended by its global chief Satya Nadella, both communications and IT minister Ravi Shankar Prasad and IT secretary JS Deepak had strongly emphasized the need for a policy that leverages the use of public cloud infrastructure.
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