Almost 17 lakh govt email accounts moved to Zoho's cloud platform at the cost of Rs 180 crore

In October 2025, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) announced to upgrade the legacy e-mail system to a cloud-based, secure and scalable system.

Now, Meity at Lok Sabha has revealed that it has moved a little over 16.68 lakh government email IDs to a cloud-based communication platform operated by M/s Zoho Corporation Ltd, an indigenous company co-founded by Sridhar Vembu.

The legacy email communication was manned by the National Informatics Centre (NIC). The latter was launched in 1976 under the MeitY, and it has been the sole IT support system for government agencies.

However, due to faster and ever-evolving cyber threats and a lack of proper digital hygiene among employees, data breaches have often occurred not just in government agencies, but also in corporate companies worldwide.

In the recent past, Indian government agencies have suffered ransomware attacks, and employees have fallen prey to honey traps laid by enemy countries.

High-profile cases include the cyber attack on the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) in 2022. Hackers took control of 1.3TB of data and five servers, causing a huge loss to the government.

In the following year, 2023, MeitY called for a tender on the Government e-Marketplace (GeM-CPPP), inviting private firms to offer secured mail services. And, M/s Zoho Corporation Ltd won the bid. It has passed the security requirements defined by the NIC.

The security architecture of the e-mail platform ensures all email data is encrypted both at rest and in transit, with specific requirements for end-to-end encryption using RSA 256 and TLS 1.3 standards.

To ensure high reliability, the Zoho Corp has been mandated to maintain Disaster Recovery sites in different seismic zones at least 500 kilometres apart, with strict Recovery Time Objectives (RTO) and Recovery Point Objectives (RPO) to minimise data loss during contingencies.

As per the agreement, the government has so far migrated around 16.68 lakh email accounts to the Zoho platform.

Depending on storage requirements (30GB to 100GB per account), each email account costs anywhere between Rs 170 and Rs 300. As per the available data, the government has reportedly spent a little over 180.1 crores.

As per MeitY, the email system has been integrated with the NIC-CERT Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) system. Furthermore, the system requires Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA), mobile device management (MDM), and advanced threat protection mechanisms to prevent phishing, malware, and data loss (DLP).

Moving to a more secure platform doesn't guarantee that accounts will not get hacked. Every employee must develop digital hygiene. They should not click URLs sent to emails from unknown persons, and avoid visiting shady websites using official email ID-linked online search platforms.

Also, each government department's computer admin must back up important documents in secure cloud storage, set up two-factor authentication to sign in to email accounts and regularly update the system with the latest software security patches to fix vulnerabilities in the system.

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