Amazon Web Services (AWS), the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud provider, and an Amazon.com company, has vowed to assist public sector customers in pursuing their smart city journey through support of innovative solutions by its partners.
According to AWS, there is a surge in demand for cloud, open source technology, modernised applications and cloud database to drive innovative smart city solutions among those in the government sector as governments want to ensure quality services for citizens.
The government cloud market was valued at US$27.32 billion globally in 2021 and it is expected to reach US$77.39 billion by 2029 with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 13.9%, according to Data Bridge Market Research.
DELIVERING GLOBAL BEST PRACTICES
“The pandemic drove governments to act like startups. They continue that approach now and are moving faster and are not going back to old procurement processes. They are sharing and leveraging global best practices,” Jeff Kratz, general manager for worldwide public sector partners at AWS, told the Bangkok Post.
“Moving to the cloud can support remote work, mobile communication, the use of innovative services with a pay-as-you-go model, the ability to scale, and provide interoperability, agility and security,” said Mr Kratz.
Today, AWS has the largest and most dynamic community, with millions of active customers every month, and more than 100,000 partners from over 150 countries.
During the pandemic, AWS customers in Vietnam helped the government provide telemedicine and medicine delivery services. Med247, a Vietnamese startup that operates a medical application and care facilities across Vietnam has developed a platform that combines traditional health models with telemedicine technology on an application for patients and doctors to bring affordable healthcare to all. They offer services such as 24/7 video calls, testing and drug delivery. Med247 runs 90% or more of their infrastructure on AWS, and is able to scale rapidly and easily at low cost.
In Brunei, IPSB Technology – a partner of AWS – assisted Radio Television Brunei (RTB) in deploying a streaming internet platform, RTBGo, with applications via Android and iOS, which have boosted the number of audiences and support communication with citizens. Using AWS, IPSB was able to apply automatic scaling capabilities to handle the increased workload on RTBGo, enabling the public to access the website for timely news and content, especially during the Covid-19 pandemic.
In Thailand, DailiTech, a partner of AWS, delivered AWS Outposts powered by Intel, for state enterprise National Telecom (NT), extending the cloud services to the locals. This was the first deployment of its kind in Asia Pacific. With AWS Outposts, NT can help the Thai government and public sector organisations increase the speed and agility of e-services, while maintaining data residency. At the same time, they can achieve greater security for a variety of data workloads and reduce the time, resources, operational risk and maintenance downtime required to manage IT infrastructure by leveraging a fully managed service. The people of Thailand can enjoy a more seamless experience when using public sector citizen services.
GOVERNMENTS LEANING TO OPEN SOURCE
Governments are adopting cloud services to ensure security, which is a real big push on open source.
“Open source solutions have created an area that many governments use to connect and support interoperability within their communities,” said Mr Kratz.
AWS has launched a new program, called “Solution Spark”, which helps partners develop solutions to for public sector customers using open source AWS solutions. The program helps partners to be able to respond quicker to government demand.
Governments are moving their on-premise database into the cloud to gain access to new innovation.
“We have a whole migration acceleration program that helps move all existing databases from on-premise into the cloud to help modernise and fully utilise data,” said Mr Kratz.
SMART CITY DRIVE
According to Mr Kratz, to pursue smart city project, governments want technologies that can address city management in connection with water, traffic, pollution, waste and lighting while needing Internet of things (IoT) to collect data for analysis through cloud.
By 2045, the world’s urban population is expected to increase by 1.5 times to six billion, according to The World Bank Group.
“We need to consider how we can help build efficient, innovative, inclusive and sustainable cities for the future,” Mr Kratz said.
To address the needs of governments and city leaders to shape their cities for the future, AWS has launched the AWS Smart City Competency program that will deliver recommendations by AWS partners to customers to help them build and deploy innovative smart city solutions.
“At AWS, we started with our customers and worked backward to help address the needs of the locals and state governments,” Mr Kratz said. “Our services are based on what customers are asking for.”
Governments can connect and collaborate with AWS partners to help them address their needs in their smart city journey.
The AWS Smart City Competency will differentiate highly specialised AWS partners with a demonstrated deep technical expertise and proven track record of customer success within the smart city use cases.
Through the program, customers will be able to quickly and confidently identify AWS partners to help them address smart city-focused challenges, accelerate and optimise city reforms and improve quality of life for citizens.
DOUBLING DOWN ON ASEAN
Mr Kratz said ASEAN is an important region for AWS. Over the past decade, AWS has made significant investments in ASEAN to collaborate with partners and accelerate innovation for local governments and public sector agencies, helping them improve services for citizens around the country.
AWS launched its first Asia-Pacific Region in Singapore in 2010. Following this launch, AWS has invested US$6.51 billion in local infrastructure and jobs across Singapore. AWS launched its second region in Indonesia in December 2021 and estimates it will create 24,700 direct and indirect jobs with an estimated US$5 billion (IDR$71 trillion) in planned investment in the local economy. The Indonesia Region will also add an estimated US$10.9 billion (IDR$155 trillion) over the next 15 years to Indonesia’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP).
In October 2022, AWS also announced plans to launch a new AWS Region in Thailand, which consists of three Availability Zones, adding to the existing 90 Availability Zones across 28 geographic regions. AWS pledged to invest more than US$5 billion (190 billion baht) in the AWS Region in Thailand over the next 15 years as part of AWS’s commitment to supporting Thailand’s digital transformation.
AWS plans to deepen its investment with the launch of new AWS Local Zones in Manilla, Bangkok and Vietnam, which are a type of infrastructure deployment that places AWS compute, storage, database and other services closer to customers – enabling them to build and deploy applications that require single-digit millisecond latency closer to end users or on-premises data centres.
AWS is doubling down on ASEAN to support governments with our network of local partners as the public sector takes bold steps to accelerate cloud innovation. In Malaysia, AWS was the first international cloud service provider to have concluded and signed a Cloud Framework Agreement with the Malaysian government. In Thailand, we are supporting the Thai government’s Thailand 4.0 digital initiative, through our Memorandum of Understanding with the Ministry of Digital Economy and Society to help the digital transformation of the Thailand Government Cloud.
COMMITMENT TO SUSTAINABILTY
AWS continues to focus on building a sustainable business for customers and the planet. Amazon is on a path to powering its operations with 100% renewable energy by 2025, and is the world’s largest corporate buyer of renewable energy.
In ASEAN, Amazon has two solar energy projects in Singapore, a 62-megawatt (MW) project with Sunseap and a 17.6MW project with Sembcorp, and recently announced its first solar projects in Indonesia (210 MW) with national utility PT PLN (Persero).
In Asia, Amazon has now invested in 15 utility-scale renewable energy projects with a total capacity of more than 1,300 MW across Australia, China, India, Indonesia, Japan and Singapore. AWS also enables customers to build sustainability solutions ranging from carbon tracking to energy conservation to waste reduction, using AWS services to ingest, analyse and manage sustainability data.
BUILDING A DIGITALLY SKILLED WORKFORCE
Mr Kratz also highlighted the importance of having a cloud-ready and digitally-skilled workforce.
“Countries throughout the region must prepare their future generations to deal with a surge in cloud usage,” Mr Kratz added.
Research by AWS Cloud Economics shows that AWS customers in ASEAN – across commercial and public sectors – who migrated to AWS are seeing an acceleration in innovation, with an approximate 29% reduction in time-to-market for new features and applications, about 41% increase in employee efficiency, and an improvement of about 37% in operational resiliency through less downtime of services.
The ASEAN region is riding a wave of innovation, which relies heavily on a digital workforce equipped to meet the rising demand for cloud computing.
AWS commissioned a study “Building Digital Skills for the Changing Workforce in APJ” by AlphaBeta earlier this year which found that by 2025, three of the top five digital skills in most demand will be cloud-related .
Meeting the demand for digitally skilled talent will require closer collaboration between the public and private sectors to continue investing in education; and accelerating training to meet future needs for skills in cloud computing, machine learning, data analytics, cybersecurity and other emerging technologies.
AWS is deeply invested in helping countries across APJ to address the digital and cloud skills shortage through education, training and support. AWS has trained over 700,000 individuals across ASEAN with cloud skills since 2017.
In Thailand, the Ministry of Digital Economy and Society is collaborating with AWS to train more than 1,200 public sector employees with cloud skills, so that they can implement cloud technologies at scale, make better data-driven business decisions and innovate new services to drive improved outcomes for Thai citizens.
