Hundreds of thousands soldiers secure India’s borders round-the-clock so that the country and the people can go about their daily life at ease and have a peaceful sleep.
However, the complex level to which the world has evolved, it is now the unmanned and digital warfare that is increasingly replacing the physical battle. In the new scheme of things, secure communications capabilities play a vital role for the defence establishments.
In the light of this, Indian Army has recently awarded a crucial task to Larsen & Toubro that will bring about revolutionary changes as far as the communications capabilities of the armed forces are concerned.
L&T’s Smart World & Communication (SWC) business has been assigned to build a first-of-its-kind, state-of-the-art Unified Network Management System (UNMS) for the Army. This is to help manage, support and operate the countrywide Armed Forces Network under the Network for Spectrum (NFS).
NFS is an optical fibre based ‘Nationwide Communication Network’ exclusive to the Defence Services and it interconnects 414 defence establishments across India. It is being developed as a secure, multi-service and multi-protocol converged Next Generation Network for the Army, the Navy and the Air Force.
In layman’s parlance, the UNMS, to be built by L&T, will enable the Army establishments to communicate and exchange data securely without using the spectrum that common people use to make a call or send out an email.
“This is an extremely crucial and sensitive project for the Ministry of Defence, and we are proud that the Ministry has reposed faith in our technical, engineering and solutioning capabilities to execute this project,” says Mr S N Subrahmanyan, L&T’s CEO & Managing Director.
The Rs 2,700-crore project involves the creation of a resilient Cloud based IT infrastructure on Infrastructure as a Service (IAAS) model. The scope includes developing a UNMS based on Next Generation Operations System and Software (NGOSS).
The UNMS will interface with disparate layers of the Armed Forces Network, the National Network Operations Centers (NOCs), Disaster Recovery NOCs, Regional NOCs, Security Operation Centers, Tier III Data Centres and the Training Infrastructure.
Once ready, it will allow real-time monitoring of the network and IT assets for inventory and configuration management, automated service fulfilment, and security alerts to detect and respond to any breach.
This, in turn, will help the Army to scale securely with superior visibility, response, recovery, and resilience. The project is to be implemented in 18 months.
