Third Party Audit for Tripura SWANs
By CXOtoday Staff
Mumbai, Jul 22, 2008

Tripura has become the first Indian state to hire a third party audit (TPA) for its State Wide Area Network (SWAN) deployments.

Rakesh Sarwal, IT commissioner and secretary for Tripura said, "Third party audit was a mandate passed by the department of information technology to monitor SWAN deployments. All states have to do it, we are the first."

He said that Pricewater Coopers (Pac) has been selected as the TPA for the state for five years. Pac will monitor the networks, point out faults and submit quarterly reports to the state government. BSNL is laying the leased lines for the project.

The tender was floated around two months back, and the project was awarded to Pac one month ago.

Neel Ratan, executive director and leader for PwC's e-governance practice, India, said that firm will set up a team to manage the project. "We will monitor the clauses defined in the service level agreements (SLAs), and whether the networks are being laid as per the memorandum of understanding (MoU) signed with the government."

Additionally, Pac would also evaluate the quality of service offered by the service provider, conduct periodic inspection of the network and advise the state government on issues like bandwidth updation,
According to news reports in local media, DIT has sanctioned Rs. 20.04 crore to the Tripura government for the project. The state government will bear the remaining 40 per cent of the cost and the investment for site preparation and bandwidth.

As per the SWAN policy of the DIT, all state and union territories have to implement SWANs under two options: Public Private Partnership (PPP) or in the second case, the national informatics center will set up and operate the SWAN for five years.

TPA audit will include maintenance of an inventory register to have Post Office Protocol (POP) wise equipment list, including hardware and software, updating inventory registry, review of documentation, physical verification on sample basis and reports generated using Network Management System (NMS).


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