We want  to power every ‘National e-governance platform’ with AWS cloud :  Peter Moore, Regional MD – Public Sector, APJ, AWS

Public sector organisations across APJ are looking ahead and seizing opportunities to drive digital transformation to deliver faster, modernised citizen services, AWS is preparing to become a dominant cloud player to tap the public sector opportunities by expanding IT infrastructure and creating new jobs.

Following the launch of the Amazon Web Services (AWS) first in Mumbai Region in 2016, the cloud provider is all set to launch its second region in Hyderabad by the end of 2022. So far, AWS  has invested US$ 3.71 billion in local infrastructure and jobs across India.

Unarguably, AWS is becoming one of the fastest growing cloud providers, and working closely with the state and centre government agencies on several cloud projects. Using AWS, C-DAC built and launched eSanjeevaniOPD teleconsultation service in just 19 days, ‘Samarth’ eGov project by the University of Delhi leverages AWS’s robust availability, scalability, speed, agility, security, and flexibility to process more than 7.6 million student admission applications, handles more than 600,000 faculty and staff recruitment applications. The Government of Telangana is another example of the public sector that has been the early adopter of the cloud services. It is now further advancing its Cloud Adoption Framework to transform the speed, scale, quality, and efficiency of citizen service delivery for its 40 million residents. 

In an exclusive interview, Peter Moore, AWS regional managing director for worldwide public sector in Asia Pacific and Japan says, “Governments across APJ took bold steps during the Covid-19 pandemic to migrate to the cloud and leverage its benefits. Public sector organisations across APJ had to act quickly to find digital solutions to everyday challenges to keep citizens safe while managing an evolving pandemic response. Seeing the momentum, we want to participate in each opportunity around  ‘National priorities platforms’ which the Centre and various state governments are building for citizens of India. We want to bring disruptive innovation to the business of government.” 

 Keeping the momentum 

In 2017, Amazon Internet Services Pvt Ltd (AISPL), achieved full CSP empanelment by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), since then AWS has strengthened its public sector business in India.  Presently, Japan, India and Australia are the first three regions across Asia Pacific where AWS has opened its second regions to meet the growing need of cloud services. 

In the last nine months, Amazon Web Services (AWS) has signed six government cloud services agreements to boost digitisation in Japan, Thailand, Malaysia, Australia (including national and state agreements) and New Zealand. 

AWS cloud capabilities are well suited for the needs of the future. “Bringing the agility so that the public sector can rapidly respond to situations that occur during the pandemic. Increasingly, governments and citizens are all thinking what’s next? Unless you don’t have the ability to respond to a massive scale very quickly. It’s not really going to allow you to move forward,” Moore opines. 

“Every level of the government has a massive amount of IT, which is getting older. The world is changing but their IT systems are not changing. We want to focus on national platforms and state level priorities. By digitally transforming on the cloud, the public sector can rapidly scale services to meet spikes in demand, and innovate widely using the latest cloud technology,” he continues.

Building resilience with second region in Hyderabad

Moore further shares that the second region is expected to deliver the highest level of resilience in India for cloud services. “We try to create more resilient infrastructure for any unforeseen events like floods and earthquakes, etc. The second region in Hyderabad does create geographically distributed availability and enhancements of our services,” he points out.

Research by Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud Economics shows that AWS customers in APJ across commercial and public sectors who migrated to AWS are seeing an acceleration in innovation, with an approximate 29 per cent reduction in time to market for new features and applications, and about 30 per cent increase in employee efficiency.

Lastly, as governments priorities improving the delivery and quality of citizen services, the focus is on taking the lessons learned from the pandemic to make sure the acceleration of cloud adoption continues across the public sector.