Government Hopes 5 Mn Officials Will Use Its Secure Email By March 2015 | TechTree.com

Government Hopes 5 Mn Officials Will Use Its Secure Email By March 2015

The program will cost Rs 100 crore and safeguard sensitive government data from the prying eyes of cyber criminals and other governments

 

In a bid to safeguard critical and sensitive government data, the Indian government aims to have over 5 million officials use its secure email client by the end of the current fiscal. The announcement comes soon after the decision to ban the use of popular email services such as Gmail and Yahoo! for official communication purposes.

"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," said R S Sharma, Secretary of Department of Electronics and Information Technology (DeitY), according to an ET report.

The government has allocated funds of Rs 100 crore for establishing a secure and encrypted email service for government officials, which was proposed by DeitY. Apart from the secure email client itself, the funds will be used to ramp up security of the servers that will store these official emails.

"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," added Sharma.

The ET report adds that save for the Ministry of Defense and the Ministry of External Affairs, all government communication will be routed through NIC. While the Ministry of Defense already has its own secure email client, the Ministry of External Affairs may follow suit, as the data shared calls for even higher levels of security.

With recent hacks of popular email services coming to light, global governments have been scrambling to setup more secure data sharing and storage methods. Another major reason is that of data snooping which is being carried out by several governments themselves, as a way to keep tabs on secrets of their allies and enemies alike.


TAGS: Indian Government, email client, Security

 
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