new delhi: The Centre has migrated approximately 12.68 lakh official e-mail accounts, including 7.45 lakh accounts belonging to central government employees, to a cloud-based e-mail platform run by Zoho through the National Informatics Centre (NIC), the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology told the Lok Sabha on Wednesday.
In response to an unstarred question by Trinamool Congress Lok Sabha member Abhishek Banerjee on the cost, scale and oversight of the migration to Zoho-based emails, Minister of State for Electronics and IT Jitin Prasada said that, as per the email policy of the government, use of email services provided by NIC alone is mandatory for all official communications.
Zoho has been selected as a Master System Integrator to provide a robust, sovereign, secure cloud-based email solution capable of supporting government users across ministries/departments.
The minister said the platform ensures professional upgrades, seamless migration of the existing e-mail accounts and integration with modern office productivity tools such as word processors, spreadsheets and presentation software. The contract provides for government ownership of all data and IP generated during the engagement, assured continuity, and rollback options. On security safeguards, the government said the email system has been designed with a rigorous security architecture to protect critical government data. All email data is encrypted both at rest and in transit, with end-to-end encryption standards.