UCBs To Get Cloud Data Centre

Developed by the National Urban Co-operative Finance and Development Corporation (NUCFDC), this private community cloud will comply with RBI guidelines on data security, privacy, and IT standards. Sahakar Cloud will offer pay-per-use IT infrastructure, cyber-resilient features, and support for advanced technologies like AI, ML, analytics, and quantum computing

The government has begun the process of creating a cloud and data centre for urban cooperative banks (UCBs) to achieve economies of scale.

National Urban Co-operative Finance and Development Corporation (NUCFDC), an umbrella organization uniting UCBs across India, intends to build ‘Sahakar Cloud’ as a state-of-the-art private community cloud, official sources told Bizz Buzz. Sahakar Cloud will be fully compliant with the Reserve Bank of India’s guidelines on IT, data protection, privacy, and cyber security, they added.

Sahakar Cloud will have cyber-resiliency including protection from zero-day attacks, desired scalability, high availability, and redundancy to mitigate the risks due to any disaster or disruption in business continuity. It will render services like IT hardware and software at an affordable and pay-per-use model.

It will have the capability to run workloads based on the latest technology including artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), data warehouse, analytics, open-source technologies, cyber security-related technologies, and quantum computing.

Sahakar Cloud intends to roll out various services, including platform, infrastructure, disaster recovery, backup, cyber security, and compliance.

Sahakar Cloud will be a platform for the core banking system, UPI switch, payment and settlement system, fraud risk management solution, mobile banking app, internet banking system, loan origination & management system, etc.

It will immediately host new apps without the lengthy process of procuring or commissioning hardware. It will offer high availability of hardware and on-demand scale-up during month-end, quarter-end, and others. It will have compliant and upgraded hardware reducing the IT efforts of UCBs. It will also provide a comprehensive dashboard of IT hardware, expenditure, and optimization.

Sahakar Cloud will reduce switch-over time, provide for surprise drills as also a comprehensive dashboard for all drills, and offer protection from data loss threats.

It will also provide backup of data, restoration, and period-based retention of data, decrease the cost of backup equipment and software, offer a dashboard for backup and restorations, and reduce the efforts of maintaining full-time teams.

It will provide basic cyber security monitoring on a subscription basis, zero-day threat detection, and cyber-security incident management. Sahakar Cloud will run compliance software on a subscription basis, provide built-in RBI compliance parameters and reports, reduce UCB efforts for data consolidation, and provide a timely compliance dashboard.