Bhubaneswar: The National Informatics Centre (NIC) has set up a state-of-the-art cloud-enabled national data centre here, its fourth such facility after ones in Delhi, Hyderabad and Pune.

Union electronics and IT and law and justice minister Ravi Shankar Prasad inaugurated the facility on Monday in presence of Union minister Dharmendra Pradhan.

Prasad said the centre would boost Odisha's digital development. "The centre is important because the sanctity of data is vital and in the IT ecosystem, it adds to the digital clout of a state or location and raises its global profile," he said.

The data centre will host new and existing applications of the central and state governments and has the ability to support 35,000 virtual servers.

"The National Data Centre will provide better job opportunities to youths of Odisha. We have a huge human resource in digital entrepreneurship, IT, digital governance and digital economy," said Pradhan.

The National Informatics Centre, which currently has 4,500 people on its payroll, plans to hire another 800 across various levels of the organisation with 350 dedicated to cyber security.

The data centre will offer 24x7 operations with secure hosting for e-governance applications of the governments. A centralised cloud environment has been established to host multiple applications with simplified operations and increased application responsiveness.

It will also provide benefits such as on-demand access to information and communication technology infrastructure for easy availability and quick deployment of applications and standardised platforms of deployment.

The centre will address the increased load from various new digital projects.

National Informatics Centre director-general Neeta Verma said: 'The launch of the new government projects such as MyGov, goods and services tax's e-way bill, direct benefits transfer among others have increased the demand for computer, storage and networking in the past two-three years."