Indian government to use own secure email service by March 2015

The Indian government will start using its own secure email by March 2015 as it plans to ban use of popular email services like Gmail and Yahoo! in its official communication to safeguard critical and sensitive government data.

The government has approved the proposal moved by Department of Electronics and Information Technology (DeitY) to establish a secure and encrypted email service for government officials and by March 2015, 5 million officials will be using it. The project has already been allocated a budget of Rs 100 crore, that includes increasing infrastructure and additional security of servers that will be used to store the mails.

According to reports, the government communication, excluding the Ministry of Defence and External Affairs, will be done using the NIC platform. The Defence Ministry has its own separate secure email server and the External Affairs ministry may also follow soon.

"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," DeitY Secretary R S Sharma told PTI.

"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," he said.

The move comes after five million usernames and passwords of Google were reported to have been leaked online by Russian hackers, earlier this month. Governments world wide have been trying to secure their official communication post Snowden revelations about NSA surveillance.

Source: ET