Industry
Public Services
Forward-thinking government for citizen-first services
Highlights
Many mission-critical applications and workloads – such as those related to taxation, law enforcement, land records, and sensitive domains like defense and space research – continue to operate on on-premises infrastructure. This is largely due to the absence of robust and resilient sovereign cloud that meets the stringent requirements of national security, data privacy, cybersecurity, and protection against geopolitical risks.
Recognizing the government of India’s growing necessity for a sovereign cloud to host workloads for mission-critical applications with data privacy, regulatory compliance, and security needs, TCS has built TCS SovereignSecure Cloud. It is a first-of-its-kind, indigenous and secure cloud with integrated AI capabilities to support government institutions, public sector enterprises, and regulated industries.
TCS SovereignSecure Cloud offers resilient infrastructure, scalability, and security, all under sovereign principles, to governments and their departments. It also provides a bouquet of next-generation services, such as AI and Ml, GenAI and TCS proprietary products, to fast-track governments’ aspiration of highly intelligent and productive systems.
Overview
To accelerate the Digital India vision, the Indian government is relentlessly deploying digital platforms and high-end computing infrastructure across its agencies and organizations.
Currently, significant mission-critical applications and workloads related to tax, law enforcement, land records, and sensitive sectors such as defense and space research run on on-premises infrastructure. This is due to the limited availability of equivalent robust and resilient sovereign cloud that aligns with required national security including protection from geopolitical risks, data privacy, and cybersecurity requirements.
On-premises deployments usually face challenges like interoperability issues, high ownership costs, unscalable architecture, and difficulty integrating new technologies.
The answer lies in a sovereign cloud environment that should leverage the economies of scale of cloud computing while strictly protecting data, complying with privacy needs, ensuring operational sovereignty, and enabling easy access to the full range of cloud services with powerful computing. It should also support India’s AI and GenAI vision and align with the government’s innovation, security, and self-reliance goals.
Solution
TCS SovereignSecure Cloud with integrated AI is designed to meet the Indian government’s sovereign digital infrastructure needs.
TCS offers a sovereign-by-design cloud service dedicated for government institutions, public sector enterprises, and regulated industries. With hybrid cloud capability, TCS SovereignSecure Cloud combines a full range of cloud capabilities with solid data security and a layer of compliance that logically and physically separates the sovereign data. It offers ability to leverage other clouds and on-premises infrastructure through seamless integration, offering cost-effectiveness while adhering to applicable compliances and regulations.
TCS SovereignSecure Cloud is engineered to keep sensitive data within India’s borders, leveraging TCS data centres across availability zones of Mumbai and Hyderabad, and soon expanding to data centers in Delhi, Coimbatore, and Guwahati. Its interoperability feature protects existing investments by seamlessly integrating with on-premises infrastructures. Additionally, it includes Cloud Cockpit, a comprehensive dashboard that effectively allows organizations to monitor, plan, and manage their cloud usage effectively. This combination of features empowers organizations to optimize their operations and digital assets under sovereign principles and enables FinOps, capacity planning, cloud management, and smart analytics.
Built on the pillars of sovereignty, security, and sustainability, with AI integrated into its foundation, TCS SovereignSecure Cloud provides dedicated infrastructure and delivers a high-performance, compliant, and resilient digital ecosystem, enabling compliance with the Digital Personal Data Protection Act of 2023.
The offering completely ensures the sovereignty of:
- Data, through control over encryption and access control
- Digital, by minimizing dependency on the provider’s software
- Operations, by offering complete visibility into and control over operations
Its zero-trust architecture ensures uncompromised security with continuous verification, least-privilege access, and proactive threat defense, protecting India’s most critical digital assets. This air-gapped, multi-layered security model safeguards against external threats and is equipped to mitigate risks of data breaches and cyber threats, providing a highly secure environment for government data.
TCS SovereignSecure Cloud is powered by green energy and aims to achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2030, making it highly sustainable. It focusses on energy efficiency, waste management and water conservation to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
In addition to standard cloud offerings such as scalable compute, memory, and storage, TCS SovereignSecure Cloud offers advanced cloud services including PaaS services and integrated AI and GenAI, with GPUs, HPC, and scalable storage to support advanced analytics and automation. It comes with pre-built AI optimized hybrid cloud management, offering AI training and inferencing efficiently.
The offering aims to revolutionize the Indian government’s technology landscape, presenting significant opportunities for expanding digital governance, digital public infrastructure, and digital public goods in a sovereign environment.
TCS can also develop a dedicated sovereign cloud for enterprises in regulated sectors that need to run critical and sensitive workloads in secure settings. This cloud environment would be separate from the isolated setup designed for government entities. While these enterprises will benefit from the same sovereign principles – data security, compliance, and privacy - their infrastructure will be independently tailored to meet their specific operational and regulatory requirements.
Benefits
TCS SovereignSecure Cloud is a highly efficient, secure, and scalable cloud service.
TCS SovereignSecure Cloud is engineered to comply with regulatory and privacy directives. It is built on the hybrid cloud architecture, which provides seamless interoperability and promotes innovation.
With TCS’ offering, government agencies can benefit from:
TCS SovereignSecure Cloud operates in a secure and isolated environment, keeping cyber threats and other internet-based security risks at bay.
TCS SovereignSecure Cloud ensures that the data and applications environment remain within local jurisdictions and control, insulated from global disruption, and provides data and operational sovereignty.
TCS SovereignSecure Cloud offers dynamic scalability and flexibility. It addresses the limitations of static resource provisioning in traditional on-premises environments and seamlessly handles transient workload spikes.
TCS SovereignSecure Cloud can be deployed from TCS secure data centers or the Indian government’s data center of choice, offering flexibility and alignment with sovereign operational needs.
TCS SovereignSecure Cloud includes CloudCockpit, a comprehensive dashboard that enables organizations to monitor, plan, and manage their cloud usage effectively. This combination of features, along with FinOps, helps optimize operations and digital assets.
TCS SovereignSecure Cloud comes integrated with sovereign AI. It offers a pre-built AI optimized hybrid cloud integrated with HPC capabilities, scalable storage, and on-demand GPU availability to efficiently support AI training and inferencing. With intelligent hybrid orchestration, the offering ensures AI workloads scale seamlessly based on real-time demand delivering flexibility, performance, and cost efficiency. Its pre-built modules and APIs allow seamless integration into government workflows, and provides enterprise grade security through private AI model and boxed LLM hosting with end-to-end encryption and access controls.
The TCS advantage
TCS is renowned for its market leadership in driving large-scale transformation in the public services sector.
TCS has partnered with governments and businesses worldwide for the past 50 years. We believe innovation and collective knowledge can transform our future with greater purpose.
TCS brings the following differentiators to an engagement:
- Domain expertise: TCS has been a long-standing strategic IT partner for the government of India, both at the center as well across various states. TCS has architected and managed several national programs, enhancing digital infrastructure, citizen services, and impacting millions. Key projects include passport issuance, health insurance, financial inclusion, investor facilitation, and pension administration. These initiatives have improved government service delivery and strengthened e-governance, giving us a deeper and wider understanding of the government’s broad goals and diverse business needs. With expertise in government programs and large-scale execution, TCS is well-suited to build India’s secure, AI-integrated sovereign cloud, ensuring compliance, resilience, and readiness for the future.
- Heterogenous cloud ecosystem: TCS SovereignSecure Cloud, facilitates a heterogeneous cloud ecosystem, bringing together cloud-native and legacy applications. This capability allows customers to harness the cloud while protecting their existing investments.
- Sovereign presence: A trusted and reputed Indian company will run TCS SovereignSecure Cloud. Also, headquartered in India and driving whole sovereign cloud operations from India, TCS has a holistic understanding of the local regulations and privacy laws, ensuring data and operational sovereignty. The indigenous components built by TCS using open stack minimizes the risks associated with foreign software companies.
