Popular
email services like Gmail and Yahoo! are likely to be banned for
official use to safeguard critical and sensitive government data.
A
proposal to this effect is being moved by Department of Electronics and
Information Technology (DeitY) for Cabinet approval by month-end,
sources said.
Government
communication, barring those of Ministry of Defence and External
Affairs, will be done using the platform of the National Informatics
Centre (NIC), they added.
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 this week, five million usernames and passwords of Google were
reported to have been leaked online by Russian hackers.
Government is expected to route official communication through the National Informatics Centre's (NIC) email service.
DeitY
has drafted the policy on use of email for government offices and
departments and views and comments of ministries concerned are being
taken on this, sources said.
Sources
said the policy seeks to protect large amount of critical government
data and aims to make it mandatory for government offices to communicate
only on nic.in platform, not on commercial email services Gmail,
Yahoo!, Hotmail, etc.
The
policy is expected to cover about 5-6 lakh Central and state government
employees for using the email service provided by NIC, they added.
To ensure smooth working of the NIC platform, DeitY will soon require about Rs 4-5 crore to ramp up NIC infrastructure.
Besides,
a total investment of around Rs 50-100 crore would be required for full
operationability of the policy, including integrating emails with cloud
so that official data can be saved on a cloud platform and can then be
easily shared with the concerned government ministries and departments.
Governments
globally have also been trying to secure their official communication
post fallout of the Snowden saga, which contended the US intelligence
agencies used a secret data- mining programme to monitor worldwide
Internet data to spy on various countries, including India.
Source: The Economics Times
ConversionConversion EmoticonEmoticon