Indian army is now on cloud. Defence minister Manohar Parrikar today gave the army its Central Data Centre, Army Cloud and Digi-Locker.

These facilities are a part of the Digital Army programme and Parrikar said this can be of great use for faster documentation, information and speedy delivery of services. He spoke of the need to educate and sensitize the service people of the advantages of technology while stressing on maintaining, checking and securing the system.

In keeping with the national vision of Digital India, the Indian Army has launched a program for Digital Army with nine pillars for digitisation. For any modern army, the network centric operations are essential for meeting enhanced challenges of asymmetry, lethality, fluidity and non-linearity in the present day battlefield. The Indian Army is addressing this key area comprehensively.

Three of the nine pillars of this umbrella program, namely Broadband highways, Universal access to telephones and army data network stress upon information technology Infrastructure development. Others are e-governance, electronic delivery of services and online information for all, focus on delivery of services to all units and formation headquarters.

The facility under the Army Cloud includes a Central Data Centre, a Near Line Data Centre, both in Delhi and a Disaster Recovery site for replication of its critical data along with virtualised servers and storage in an environmentally controlled complex.

This is similar to the Meghraj; the Cloud of National Informatics Centre (NIC) and will provide all information technology Infrastructure including servers for computing, storage, network and network security equipment centrally, for automation of Indian Army.

The latest technologies in the field have been incorporated in the implementation of the first ever software defined data centre, wherein all the resources could be provisioned to different applications on the cloud, on click of a button.

It has already started providing Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) to the pan Army users as the first Cloud service and will soon provide Software as a Service (SaaS).

With the launching of Digi-Locker, it will provide a secure and exclusive data storage space to all the units and formation headquarters of the army over its dedicated data network.

The Digi-Locker of Indian army is similar to e-Locker of Digital India program and has all the advanced features like digital signatures and watermarking. This is an important step towards implementation of cyber security as it precludes carriage of soft copies of data on CDs/DVDs and removable media.

Users can store, share and access the data from anywhere any time on the Army Data Network. The infrastructure and platforms being made available for automation and digitisation will catalyse the pace of digitisation in all branches of army and is a landmark towards transforming Indian Army from platform centric to a Network Centric Force, which would leverage the technology as a force multiplier.