New Delhi: An important step has been taken to help the government organisations reduce costs and complexity by moving from on-premises infrastructure to Cloud and speed up the use of GIS in their initiatives and programs.
This can be made possible with the RailTel Corporation of India Ltd, a Central Government PSU under the Ministry of Railways, and Esri India, the country’s leading Geographic Information System (GIS) Software & Solutions provider, signing an MoU to provide Cloud-based GIS Solutions to their users in the ‘Government Sector’.
This collaboration will address the strong emerging demand for ‘GIS on Cloud’, an press release said.
Due to the partnership, ‘Indo ArcGIS on Cloud’ would now be available on RailTel Cloud, giving customers the much-needed advantage of scalability, agility and cost-efficiency, it said.
Joint offerings would include software, cloud infrastructure, and related services, the release added.
With the Government’s increasing focus on using GIS for various national programs such as Digital India, Gati Shakti, Svamitva, Smart Cities, Jal Jeevan Mission, etc., the availability of robust and scalable Geospatial Infrastructure has become a huge need of the hour, it said.
Esri India has already developed a unique product called Indo ArcGIS for Indian government customers.
Apart from GIS technology products, the Indo ArcGIS suite includes industry-specific solution products for Disaster Management, Forest Management, Land Records, Electric Utility Management, Property Tax Management and many more.
In addition, 500+ data layers are available to customers through the Indian edition of ArcGIS Living Atlas, it said.
Commenting on the development, RailTel CMD Aruna Singh said, “Geospatial Infrastructure is fast becoming the backbone of many new strategic initiatives of both central and state governments in India.”
She added that RailTel, with its 2 Tier III data centers and over 61000 Kms of Optic Fiber Network, is uniquely positioned to support government organizations in deploying their GIS applications on a secure public cloud.
“With this partnership with Esri India, we intend to offer a reliable, secure and managed GIS Infrastructure for large government programs and projects,” the CMD said.
Esri Managing Director Agendra Kumar said, “The convergence of GIS and Cloud technology opens new avenues for building the Geospatial Infrastructure in India.
“The solutions and data products included in Indo ArcGIS are created with the aim to help the government and private organizations solve the most pressing problems of the country effectively with GIS.”
He added, “to facilitate enhanced collaboration and more informed decision-making at a lower cost, we are now offering Indo ArcGIS on Cloud. RailTel offers the best-in-class secured Cloud infrastructure.”
Kumar said the partnership with RailTel will foster accelerated GIS deployment and provide the power of ‘geospatial infrastructure on Cloud’ to our Indo ArcGIS users.”