Globally and in India, governments, nonprofits, healthcare organisations and education institutions are turning to the cloud to run mission-critical applications and improve system agility, security, and costs to help millions of beneficiaries. “The significance of cloud has increased manifold as the pandemic has ushered in a new era in public sector innovation,” says Max Peterson, vice-president, Worldwide Public Sector, Amazon Web Services, as he talks to Sudhir Chowdhary about the technology advancements shaping the public sector and how AWS is helping them move to the cloud. Excerpts:
What are your views on the public sector’s adoption of cloud in India?
The global pandemic has led to a massive shift in cloud adoption. Governments around the world that moved away from old legacy IP infrastructure and adopted modern cloud-based solutions were in a better position to innovate with new projects, and respond quickly and accelerate existing projects.
The potential in India to leverage cloud computing and digital transformation is enormous. It’s because of the size and the breadth of the people, industry, and ideas represented by India. The pandemic is driving a major acceleration across government departments, education, healthcare, non-profits, and public sector startups. Our customers in India are innovating rapidly, supported by the cloud.
Can you give me some examples specific to India?
We had a strong foundation already in place due to the cloud policy, our cloud empanelment through MeitY in 2017, and our partnership with Niti Aayog. When the Covid situation worsened in March 2020, we saw customers in India make immediate progress. For example, C-DAC worked with AWS to build and launch eSanjeevaniOPD teleconsultation service in just 19 days. Currently serving around 17,000 patients a day across 28 Indian states, eSanjeevaniOPD has served over 1 million patients in India who were seeking medical support virtually from homes. The speed with which they operated and scaled up after they got it right is fantastic.
Another notable example is Project StepOne, which built a telemedicine solution on AWS to augment the government’s Covid-19 response resources, allowing volunteers with the required background and skills to work remotely and directly into government systems. Project StepOne serves more than 21 states and Union territories, and has already facilitated over 8.5 million tele-consultations and is estimated to have prevented over 500,000 new infections.
CoWIN is another great example of how the government worked on the cloud with traditional partners to deliver transformational solutions. It has served over a billion scheduled vaccinations since it went live and continues to be the largest scale system of its kind in the world.
What do you see as the biggest challenges in the adoption of cloud in the public sector?
While the pandemic has accelerated the adoption of cloud and forced the public sector to focus on health services and citizens, there is still a lot to do in the government, education, healthcare, and agriculture sectors. Adoption of cloud is a challenge, and traditional procurement approaches and the availability of skilled cloud talent are key reasons.
How is AWS strengthening its focus to support public sector organisations across the globe to move to the cloud?
AWS is collaborating with the public sector to drive economic development through infrastructure investments, job creation, and education across the world and in India. In India, AWS is collaborating with higher education institutions to integrate cloud computing in mainstream college curriculum and skill students towards cloud careers. We also launched AWS re/Start in India, a free 12-week skills development and job training programme that prepares unemployed or underemployed individuals for careers in cloud computing with fundamental AWS Cloud skills and practical career skills. We are also collaborating with stakeholders such as the Niti Aayog Frontier Technologies CIC and MeitY Quantum Computing Applications Lab to drive digital innovation. There is so much more to come and AWS is privileged to be working with the Indian government in the public sector on this front.
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