Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on Wednesday, February 1, announced that the government will set up “data embassies” in the country to facilitate seamless digital transfers and continuity for other nations.

"We will facilitate the setting up of data embassies for countries looking for digital continuity solutions," Sitharaman said during her Union Budget speech in Parliament.

A data embassy is a solution implemented by nation-states to ensure a country's digital continuity with particular respect to critical databases.

How countries are embracing data embassies

According to a Google Cloud blog post, small countries around the world are turning to the concept of data embassies because they are in need of sovereign and resilient infrastructure.

Cloud computing is being quickly embraced by businesses for its speed, scale, and financial advantages. Governments are doing the same.

In order to develop scalable, interactive citizen portals, collaborate more quickly, provide citizens with large amounts of data in usable ways, and increase focus on mission-critical issues while lowering information and communication technology (ICT) expenses, they are investigating cloud-based services.

In 2015, Microsoft and Estonia, one of the world's most mature countries in digital administration, partnered on the virtual data embassy research project.

The blog post also explained how the Estonian government evaluated the risks it faced as a small country highly reliant on digital services and decided to host a backup of its most critical data and services in data centres abroad to be able to recover from these extreme disaster scenarios.

Luxembourg, Monaco and some other nations have adopted the data embassy model.

Data embassies create a new approach to securing data by leveraging diplomatic agreements bolstered by cloud technology solutions. “We expect that the concept of digital embassies will grow organically over time, as different organisations and their host countries work out legal details. We expect more organisations to join the digital embassy movement, partnering with a trusted host country to develop the legal framework required to become trusted hosts,” Google Cloud added.

(Edited by : Shoma Bhattacharjee)

First Published:Feb 1, 2023 2:58 PM IST