Jio Platforms has secured a contract worth Rs 350 crore to manage and improve cloud services at Centre’s National Informatics Centre (NIC) for five years for on-site maintenance, The Economic Times reported.

NIC, under the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), is a technology partner of the Government of India. NIC was established in 1976 to provide technology-driven solutions to Central and State Governments

According to reports, Jio has been selected to enhance NIC’s national cloud service, which will be deployed in national data centres in Delhi, Pune and Bhubaneswar.

The report added that Reliance’s Jio won the tender and has already started managing NIC’s cloud services in Bhubaneswar and Hyderabad.

The tender calls for Indian cloud partners to submit proposals to manage NIC cloud solutions under Meghraj 2.0.

NIC has sought system integrators to enhance the national cloud infrastructure and support multi-cloud services.

As the demand for online services increases, the government is launching more e-government projects. This significantly increases the requirements for efficient data centres and strategic infrastructure.

Keeping this in mind, NIC is looking to set up national data centres in Delhi, Pune, Bhubaneswar and Hyderabad, as well as 30 smaller data centres in various state capitals.

The services included in the data centre will provide the government with colocation services such as physical colocation, shared colocation, dedicated servers, and managed colocation solutions. The report said they would offer infrastructure services like configuration, bandwidth, and disaster recovery.

As part of its services, Jio will also configure a unified cloud management platform to provide secure cloud services to government users. Jio will also develop a cloud application marketplace for improving the NIC National Cloud.

Reliance’s Jio will also operate and maintain the cloud service for five years.

Currently, national data centres located in Delhi, Hyderabad, Pune, and Bhubaneswar are dedicated to hosting the NIC National Cloud under the umbrella of Meghraj Cloud.

Meghraj is an initiative of the centre to offer a wide range of services, including IaaS, PaaS and SaaS, for hosting websites, portals, and web and mobile applications.