New Delhi: Popular email services
like Gmail and Yahoo! are likely to be banned for official use
to safeguard critical and sensitive government
data.
DEITY Secretary R S Sharma
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 ofDefence 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 cyber crime 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.
PTI