If you are familiar with the modern era of media consumption, chances that you are using one of the popular OTT platforms like Netflix or Amazon are very high. In the same way you might have used one of the govt owned websites is also natural. So, have you ever wondered how come Netflix or amazon servers are always running available to stream content, whereas IRCTC kind of sites get overwhelmed every single with users trying to access. In order to understand why govt sites cannot handle data but companies like Netflix and Amazon can, we need to understand the insights of both situations.
Let’s First talk about Streaming Services, Big Companies like Netflix and Amazon will have servers all around globe to prevent latency issues, which means, Netflix may be based on US but every time you click on “Stranger Things” to watch, the request doesn’t need to fetch information from US but from the nearest server that is available to your current location.
To this having high availability servers can make it more robust and better while dealing with unforeseen issues, in this case the data will be available in more than one server, which means even if one server is down for some technical reasons, people can still access the data from the other server. Along with this having load balancers will make a huge difference; a load balancer will handle the data traffic and will distribute it among the available servers. This will keep the individual servers from getting overwhelmed by the data traffic. As you can observe there are multiple methods involved in making a server available all the time for the users to access.
Then you might be thinking, can't the government have those methods to make the servers? Though they have load balancers and high availability servers, there are few things that will limit the govt servers from being their best. Wondering what they are?
Safety and Security of Both user’s and govt’s data. Let me explain, Like we discussed, to make servers easy and fast to reach usually companies will use server farms around the world, but unfortunately govt cannot use servers around the world as backup servers, they can't risk data by uploading it into the remote servers, after all Govt issued an act to prevent companies like Facebook and others from exporting its citizens data to servers that are outside of country. The Government strictly implements these rules to protect our data, but again at the cost of speed and reliability, but I can tell you in this era of Cyber Attacks, we cannot say it is wrong, we have to sacrifice speed for security and privacy.
Coming to the IT funding corporate companies like OTT platforms and Cloud ISP’s will be doing business with those services, amazon cloud services for example will charge you for every minute of processing power that you use, and every single byte of data that you store. Netflix or amazon prime will charge you periodically based on your plan, so with that funding they can scale their server farms to huge sizes, as well as they can shrink those server farms whenever they are in losses.
But govt servers don't have that luxury, the budget that is allocated to the IT department might not be huge, and might not support rapid expansion. Since they are not making money out of the govt servers directly, priority services like defence, education, and food will eat up big chunks of annual budget, leaving IT infrastructure behind.
In my opinion the demand and utilization ratio of govt servers are on par with most of the Corporate servers. For example Netflix, YouTube, Amazon Prime etc kind of OTT platforms are already decreasing the default resolution to save burden on their servers, if you observe they are not rapidly increasing servers NOW, because they know this hike in media consumption is temporary and buying more resources will be a fix for no issue. So, they just made some adjustments.
Govt servers are following the same strategy, instead of increasing servers for small sized hikes in usage, govt only plans on upgrading when the overall usage of that server increases, thus saving people’s money and also providing maximum availability they can offer. If you think about it, Biggest OTT platform like Disney plus could not handle the traffic on the launch day, so not responding because of the huge traffic is not just a govt server thing, it can happen on both govt and private sector servers. So at the end govt servers are almost the same as corporate servers and also secure.