RailCloud Project: Business Case & Enterprise Cloud Strategy for ICT

This document presents a business case for the RailCloud project, an initiative by the Ministry of Railway to deploy a cloud computing environment for Indian Railways. The project aims to leverage cloud computing's benefits, including reduced infrastructure costs, scalability, faster deployment, and improved security, by adopting a "RailCloud First" strategy for ICT applications. The document details the project's background, problem statement, and objectives, emphasizing the importance of service level agreements (SLAs), stakeholder management, and data security. It outlines key milestones and deliverables, including vendor selection, requirements gathering, project planning, deployment, testing, and closure. The analysis highlights the shift from capital expenditures to operational expenses, cost savings, and increased agility as key value propositions, while also addressing potential challenges such as application migration and security concerns. The overall goal is to develop an ICT system with open APIs and a scale-out architecture, following Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS) frameworks, to enhance availability, functionality, and interoperability.

Business Case Template
1. Executive summary
This section should be completed after the rest of the document is finished and should be a
succinct summary of all your major points; it should not contain any information that is not
elsewhere in the document. Keep it concise.
1.1 Overview
This paper is prepared in order to develop a railway project by adopting the concept
of cloud computing. The approach in fundamentally opted for developing an ICT
system for railway. Since, cloud computing is one of the emerging technology in
today’s computing industries railway has decided to adopt this concept in order to
develop the strategy as “Railcloud First”for the application ICT. The objective of this
project is to develop an ICT system which must have inbuilt open API’s based on a
scale out architecture. The approach system must follow the IaaS as well as SaaS
framework.
1.2 Options appraisal
Over the conventional procedures railway has chosen the concept of cloud
computing in order to develop an ICT system. In order to provide the users the facility
of cloud native application which is fundamentally based on the open standard based
as well as technology independent. Another advance functionality advance
functionalities of this system is that it has high security to the database.
1.3 Costs and benefits
The approached system has several functionalities in the field of database management.
Followed by this process the system deliver the facility of database monitoring and another
database operations such as insertion deletion. Another benefit of this system that it provides
enhanced availability, functionality and agility which improves the interoperability of the
application by adopting the concept of cloud computing.
2. Introduction
Project Name: RailCloud
Project Sponsor/ Executive: Ministry of Railway
Project Manager:
2.1 Background
Ministry of railway has thought of deploying a new cloud architecture known as the RailCloud.
The cloud computing environment has been selected as this is associated with providing on
demand computing resources over the internet. Some of the other reasons lying behind the
selection of the technology is that the cost of the infrastructure would be reduced along with
providing the agility to scale up or down, faster deployment, better and improved security, pay-
only-for-use model and many more.
2.2 Problem statement
The deployment of the Cloud computing is going to bring a lot of challenges along with the
benefits that are provided. Service level agreement of the SLA is one of the important aspect
that is going to control the performance of the RailCloud. One of the important section of the
project is the stakeholder management and the stake holders associated with the project
necessarily be associated with maintaining all the security policies. Security of the information
is another crucial factor which is responsible for the success of the project so it is very
essential to make sure that proper security measures are being implemented which might
include encryption or authentication and many more. One major problem is likely to arise when

the applications are going to be migrated to the clouds. However this migration would be
associated with enhancing the availability, agility as well as the functionality along with
improving the interoperability.
2.3 Project objectives
The objective of the Project is to deploy a cloud computing environment for the Indian Railways
which would be known as RailCloud.
5. Project strategy
Key milestones and deliverables
The key milestones will be presented in a table, as follows:
Event / Milestone Deliverable Date
(or elapsed time from start
of project)
Selection of Appropriate
service provider
Appropriate vendor is to be
selected who would be
meeting all the requirements of
the Indian Railways. Week 1
Gathering the Requirements
and analysis
All the major requirements are
to be gathered and analyzed Week 2
Project Planning
All the planning’s is to be done
in a proper way along with
proper communication plan,
and all other plans Week 3
Proper Initiation The project would be initiated Week 4
Project deployment
The project would be deployed
for usage Week 5
Project Testing
All the activities of the project
would be monitored Week 6
Project closure
The project would finally be
delivered and used by the
railways Week 7