Discuss the objectives and key features of the recently launched ""Digital Army"programme under the umbrella of Digital India.

Model Answer:
Digital Army Programme is an umbrella programme for various small programmes like Army Cloud, Data Centre and Digi locker to digitize and automate processes, procedures and services for the Indian Army.It envisages Broadband network for faster Documentation, Information and speedy delivery of services. The key features of DAP are:

• The army cloud infrastructure includes two data centers, both located in Delhi, and a disaster recovery site for replication of critical data using virtualized servers and storage in secure facility.
• This is similar to Meghraj, the national cloud initiative which provides a secure and unified cyberspace for shared government services and infrastructure, provides IT resources on demand, and optimizes utilization of IT infrastructure and resources for government departments.
• The army cloud will provide IT infrastructure including servers for computing, storage, network and network security equipment centrally, for the automation of the Indian Army, the defence ministry said in a Press Information Bureau statement.
• The central data centre will be a software-defined data centre (SDDC)—a data centre that is automated by intelligent software systems. These are more secure and normally deployed for mission-critical enterprise workloads.
• It provides security based on two kinds of tools: digital signature or watermarking. Digital signature is a non-refusable, encrypted version of the message digest extracted from the data. Watermarking techniques considers multimedia data as a communication channel transmitting owner identification or content integrity information used for copyright protection.

Topics: GS-III: Indigenization of Technology and Developing New Technology