Post on 21-Apr-2018
RailCloud First Policy_Draft for Circulation_Ver 0.0 1 | P a g e
DRAFT FOR COMMENTS
Annexure-I
Sub: Rail Cloud First policy for Indian Railways.
Ref: 1. Govt of India’s GI Cloud (Meghraj) strategic Direction
paper.
2. Govt of India’s ‘Software Development & Re-Engineering
Guidelines for Cloud Ready Applications’
3. Govt of India’s ‘Policy on Adoption of Open Source Software.’
Ministry of Railways has decided to establish a RailCloud.
The same has been inaugurated by Hon’ble Minister of Railways on
12.07.17.
Cloud Computing, an emerging new technology for
deployment of ICT, is the delivery of on-demand computing
resources (e.g. servers, storage, network, applications and services)
over the internet, with reduced infrastructure costs, agility to scale
up/down, faster deployment of applications, ease in integration of
applications, better security, pay-only-for-use model. The Policy
features of Railway’s Cloud policy are proposed as:
1. RailCloud First approach: Consistent with GoI policy of ‘Cloud-
by-Default’, Indian Railway shall follow Cloud Computing as the
default ICT deployment strategy as ‘RailCloud First’ for ICT
Applications. The exception of this policy shall be in rare
circumstances when an alternative ICT deployment strategy is
essentially required for the special requirement of Railways. The
proposal for such exception shall be sent to Railway Board, for
consideration after approval by the GM of Zonal Railways /PU.
2. RailCloud System: The RailCloud system shall be built with open
APIs with an open scale out architecture. The cloud system
architecture should support horizontal scaling when required, thus
allowing to make incremental capital investments when required.
The system should support lights out scenarios by allowing non-
intrusive monitoring of solution components for better
manageability and proactive maintenance. Whenever options are
available, open source frameworks/components shall be used
instead of proprietary frameworks/components to avoid vendor
lock-in and high operation and maintenance costs.
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The RailCloud shall be deployed as Hybrid Cloud Model which
will also use the existing data centres resources (e.g. servers,
storage, network, etc, with suitable changes) and will gradually
develop service capabilities as- IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service),
PaaS (Plateform as a Service) and SaaS (Software as a Service).
3. Application Development and cloud enablement: New IT
applications shall be cloud native, open standard-based,
technology-independent and open API based architectures to
deploy on RailCloud. Also, all new applications shall use Open
Source Software (OSS) in all e-Governance systems as a preferred
option.
4. Migration of Application to Cloud: Migration of data and
applications to the cloud will enhance the availability, agility and
functionality of the application and improve the interoperability
with other applications. The existing applications are to be
migrated to the cloud progressively. For this, application-centric
approach shall be made by proper mapping of the existing
application and its associated server hardware with due
consideration to financial aspects and technical parameters and
thereafter roadmap shall be made to migrate. There are five well
established approaches to migrate traditional applications to the
cloud, these include: REHOST on Infrastructure as a Service
(IaaS), REFACTOR for Platform as a Service (PaaS), REVISE for
IaaS or PaaS , REBUILD on PaaS & REPLACE with Software as
a Service (SaaS) as detailed in the Ref. 2. In process of application
migration, adequate testing of the Cloud environment needs to be
performed, before existing (in-premise) application is
decommissioned.
5. Application and Data ownership, Intellectual Property Rights: Application ownership and IPR after hosting on RailCloud, shall
remain with the original Application owning agency. The
application owner agency shall have right on access, retrieval,
modification and deletion of the data and shall define the policies
and processes of data access. Secured access to be given to Admin
of the Application for maintenance and upgradation.
6. Security: The Info-Security will be the shared responsibility of
RailCloud managing Agency so that the Applications uploaded
/run are secure on the Cloud, and the Application Developing &
Managing/uploading agency for making the application secure and
resilient, to Run on the RailCloud, by implementing necessary
security Controls, Role-Based Authentication and suitable
encryption of Data as per the latest standards.
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The RailCloud managing Agency will get the Cloud audited
annually and application managing agency will get the application
audited annually, from CERT-In approved agency. The audit of
application may be carried out by RailCloud managing agency
when mutually agreed.
7. Uploading of an Application to Cloud: The Application & Data
Owning directorate or the Zonal Railway/PU to which Application
& Data belongs, will send the proposal for uploading the
application to OneICT Cell, which is the nodal cell for the same.
Once approved, the same would be uploaded.
8. Service Level Agreements (SLAs): The performance of the Rail-
Cloud will be defined by SLAs including parameters for up-
time/down-time, Security and Penalties. Both the agencies shall
agree on the minimum SLAs, based on the criticality of the
application.
9. The stakeholders shall follow the Govt of India’s Cloud and IT
security policies as issued from time to time.
Enclosure (soft link):
1. Government of India’s GI Cloud (Meghraj) Strategic Direction
Paper
http://meity.gov.in/writereaddata/files/GI-
Cloud%20Strategic%20Direction%20Report%281%29_0.pdf
2. Govt of India’s policy on Software Development & Re-
Engineering Guidelines for Cloud Ready Applications
http://meity.gov.in/sites/upload_files/dit/files/Application_Develop
ment_Re-Engineering_Guidelines.pdf
3. Govt of India’s policy on ‘Policy on Adoption of Open Source
Software’
http://meity.gov.in/sites/upload_files/dit/files/policy_on_
adoption_of_oss.pdf