AWS receives full empanelment for delivery of public cloud services by Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology

Amazon Web Services (AWS) today announced that Amazon Internet Services Private Limited (AISPL), an Indian subsidiary of the Amazon Group which undertakes the resale and marketing of AWS Cloud services in India, has achieved full Cloud Service Provider (CSP) empanelment, and successfully completed the STQC (Standardization Testing and Quality Certification) audit from the Indian Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) for cloud services delivered from the AWS Asia Pacific (Mumbai) Region. This certification sees AISPL join a list of approved providers that meet pre-defined government standards of quality, availability, and security. With 52 global security certifications, attestations, assurance programs, and quality audits already achieved, such as ISO 9001, SOC1, SOC2, SOC3, and more, AWS is the first global cloud service provider to earn this status in India.

Starting today, government customers can develop their own terms and conditions to procure AWS Cloud services. The empanelment process includes compliance with new global security standards and guidelines ISO 27017 and ISO 27018. For more information on the various security and compliance certifications that AWS has achieved, visit Amazon Compliance.

MeitY advises government bodies and departments to procure cloud services only from the empaneled and audit-compliant CSPs. This includes departments under Central, State, and local Governments, Public Sector Undertakings (PSUs), autonomous institutions, statutory bodies, and Nationalized Banks within India who can now use AWS for their workloads. Government organizations can take advantage of the best-in-class technology from AWS Cloud to drive transformation, and to deliver highly innovative citizen-centric services at lower cost through flagship programs such as Digital India, Skill India, and Smart Cities. AWS offers fully featured services for compute, storage, databases, IoT, networking, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), and more, from 44 Availability Zones across 16 geographic regions globally.

“We are pleased that AWS is the first cloud computing portfolio with true global scale to announce full empanelment by India’s Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology. The Government of India has been driving the mission to promote e-Governance for empowering citizens, and enabling access to digital and cloud-enabled services for its nodal agencies and public sector organizations. The empanelment of the AWS Cloud is paving the way for innovation so that government bodies can serve citizens more effectively, achieve scientific breakthroughs, reach broader constituents, and invest more time and resources into their core missions,” said Peter Moore, Regional Managing Director, Amazon Web Services, Public Sector – Asia Pacific based in AWS Singapore office. “We are excited to deepen our engagement with central, state, and local governments, and public sector bodies in India to offer them the broadest suite of cloud services, and a transformational approach to accelerate the deployment of digital services in the country.”

AWS public sector customers in India include Andhra Pradesh State Skill Development Corporation (APSSDC), Centre for Science and Environment (CSE), CSC e-Governance Services (set up by the Ministry of Electronics & IT), Gujarat Technical University, Indian Institute of Science (IISc), and Indian Institute of Technology, Guwahati.

Quality Council of India (QCI) is a non-profit autonomous society committed to promoting and protecting the interests of the nation and its citizens by propagating, adopting, and adhering to quality standards in all important spheres of activities. By using AWS, Quality Council of India has expedited the accreditation process of its various projects. “We chose AWS as the technology platform for their massive economies of scale, support for open standards, and highly secure infrastructure. We have been able to scale and simplify our accreditation processes by leveraging AWS and by using the breadth of their advanced cloud services like Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), and many more. This has helped us greatly in our mission,” said Dr. Ravi P. Singh, Secretary General, QCI. “We congratulate AISPL for completing the stringent STQC audit and becoming empaneled by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY). The optimization that AWS Cloud provides has reduced costs, and boosted the security of data within India – which is one of the prime concerns for many of our clients. I am happy that what QCI started a few years ago has now been recognized by the government and its clients through this empanelment.”

Established in 1994, The Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Guwahati is the sixth member of the IIT fraternity. Within a short period of time, IIT Guwahati has built world class infrastructure for carrying out advanced research, with state-of-the-art scientific and engineering instruments. Dr. Sethi’s project research team leveraged GPU-based Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances to develop a predictive model for prostate cancer recurrence in prostatectomy specimens. “We congratulate AISPL for completing STQC audit and becoming empaneled by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY). Hyper-scale cloud platform such as AWS enables educational institutes to increase the speed of research, and reduce time-to-results by running high performance computing (HPC) in the cloud, and scaling to larger numbers of parallel tasks rapidly than would be practical in many on-premises environments,” said Dr. Amit Sethi, Associate Professor, Indian Institute of Technology, Guwahati.

The Government of Andhra Pradesh (AP) has formed seven different ‘Missions’ to drive double-digit growth for the State, and to make AP among the most developed states in the country. The Knowledge and Skills Mission was created to provide trained and skilled manpower to all other Missions. “The Andhra Pradesh State Skill Development Corporation (APSSDC) has been working with AISPL in its mission to provide a skilled workforce across high-priority and emerging sectors, fostering entrepreneurship and innovation. We congratulate AISPL for their empanelment with MeiTY, and for successfully completing the STQC audit,” said Mr Ghanta Subbarao, Founder and Director of APSSDC.

ICT Academy is an initiative of the Government of India in collaboration with the State Governments and Industries. ICT Academy is a not-for-profit social enterprise, the first of its kind pioneer venture under the Public-Private-Partnership (PPP) model that endeavors to train higher education teachers and students to develop the next generation of teachers and industry-ready students. ICT Academy has been working with AISPL to provide AWS Cloud skills to several thousands of graduating youth among its member academic institutions across India. ”We are happy that AWS Cloud has achieved the MeitY’s empanelment, which enables us to accelerate AWS Cloud awareness and skill adoption across a larger number of youth in the country,” said M. Sivakumar, Chief Executive Officer, ICT Academy.

“Data Security Council of India (DSCI) appreciates the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology’s (MeitY’s) policy to promote cloud adoption in government by empaneling cloud service providers. This will help accelerate the migration of Government Departments and agencies to the cloud,” said Rama Vedashree, CEO, Data Security Council of India. “The STQC Accreditation reassures users. Additionally, conformance to industry best practices and security standards fosters trust, and will fast track cloud adoption in India.”

Since the launch of AWS Asia Pacific (Mumbai) Region in June 2016, more than 120,000 active customers including Tata Motors, NDTV, Lupin, Future Group, and Shoppers Stop have adopted AWS Cloud for a broad range of applications such as e-governance applications, website hosting, big data analytics, mobile applications, e-commerce platforms, mission critical business applications such as SAP, Oracle, and Microsoft, among many other use cases.

Amazon Internet Services Private Limited (AISPL), an Indian subsidiary of the Amazon Group which undertakes the resale and marketing of AWS Cloud services in India, as well as provision of training and other professional services for customers in India, has applied for and been granted the full empanelment from MeitY.