Andhra Pradesh Govt. Becomes The First In The World To Use Microsoft’s Azure Stack

The government of Andhra Pradesh recently signed an agreement with Washington based firm Redmond to utilise Microsoft’s hybrid cloud platform – Azure Stack – for the AP State Data Centre that is located in Hyderabad. The cloud solution – Microsoft Azure Stack – will be used to migrate the live applications that are currently hosted in Hyderabad to the Visakhapatnam data centre.

Post bifurcation, Telangana and Andhra Pradesh have divided their servers and applications, but have continued on to use the same State Data Centre located in Hyderabad. It was built on a funding of Rs 400 crore from the centre when the state was united. According to the Andhra Pradesh Reorganisation Act, 2014, Andhra Pradesh will continue to have a right on the centre for 10 years. But the state government is planning to move all the applications hosted to Visakhapatnam and later to Vijayawada.

“We have entered into an agreement with Microsoft for use of Azure Stack. There are about 340 applications including Mee Seva, Core Dashboard which are currently running in Hyderabad SDC. Under the agreement, the state will migrate 15 applications to Visakhapatnam data centre with the help of Azure Stack,” Rama Rao Atluri, executive director, Andhra Pradesh State FiberNet told Financial Express.

Usually, since the government is highly protective of their data, they avoid going on cloud and prefer to keep the data within boundaries. So now, to address this challenge, Microsoft Azure Stack puts the three components of a data centre – application, server and storage – into a box and delivers it to the client. Despite technically being a cloud software, it binds the entire stack in one environment.

While Microsoft has tested Azure Stack in its lab, the software hasn’t been delivered or commercially used anywhere in the world, making the Andhra Pradesh government the first in the world to do so. The government has set up a tender for setting up a co-location centre in Vijayawada. They are also creating a Disaster Recovery Centre of the Visakhapatnam data centre in Vijayawada. The state expects the unit to be set up within three months.

Microsoft reportedly approached the state government with this product. Rama Rao Atluri further stated, “This is a win-win situation for both Microsoft and AP. They want to test their product and we want to migrate our applications. Be it any company, we need such solutions.”