Report : India's official email service to have 5 million users by March
By the end of the current fiscal, five million officials will be using the Indian government's secure email, which seeks to ban use of popular email services like Gmail and Yahoo in official communication to safeguard critical and sensitive government data.
The government has approved the proposal moved by Department of Electronics and Information Technology (DeitY) to establish a secure and encrypted email service for government officials.
"We are in the process of implementing this. At present about a million officials are covered by it and we need to scale it to cover a total of 5 million employees. This process will be completed by March 2015," DeitY secretary RS Sharma told PTI.
A budget of Rs 100 crore has been allocated for the project, which includes expanding infrastructure and ramping up security of servers that will be used to store the mails, he added.
"We need to scale the infrastructure of the National Informatics Centre (NIC) to accommodate this large number of officials. Also there will be a state-of-the-art security for the service to ensure nothing happens," he said.
According to sources, government communication, barring those of ministry of defence and external affairs, will be done using the NIC platform.
While defence ministry has its own separate secure email server, the external affairs too may follow suit.
The move comes amid concerns about rising cybercrime and hacking incidents. Earlier in September, five million usernames and passwords of Google were reported to have been leaked online by Russian hackers.
The government has approved the proposal moved by Department of Electronics and Information Technology (DeitY) to establish a secure and encrypted email service for government officials.
"We are in the process of implementing this. At present about a million officials are covered by it and we need to scale it to cover a total of 5 million employees. This process will be completed by March 2015," DeitY secretary RS Sharma told PTI.
A budget of Rs 100 crore has been allocated for the project, which includes expanding infrastructure and ramping up security of servers that will be used to store the mails, he added.
"We need to scale the infrastructure of the National Informatics Centre (NIC) to accommodate this large number of officials. Also there will be a state-of-the-art security for the service to ensure nothing happens," he said.
According to sources, government communication, barring those of ministry of defence and external affairs, will be done using the NIC platform.
While defence ministry has its own separate secure email server, the external affairs too may follow suit.
The move comes amid concerns about rising cybercrime and hacking incidents. Earlier in September, five million usernames and passwords of Google were reported to have been leaked online by Russian hackers.
