Innovating, investing, and improving: AWS Summit New Delhi and AWS Summit Singapore 2022 keynote recaps

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is growing, investing, and expanding in the Asia Pacific region. India and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) are rapidly digitally transforming to enable positive socioeconomic change. The effort is a combination of government initiatives and the increasing awareness of the benefits of digitization.

At the AWS Summit New Delhi and AWS Summit Singapore, AWS leaders and customers shared stories of how they’re innovating, improving citizens’ lives, transforming their operations, and creating technology that can scale for social good. “Throughout these difficult times, our customers across public sector have been quick to respond and innovate with the cloud to save lives, provide critical citizen services, and support learner outcomes—ultimately changing the way society engages, educates, and does business for good,” said Max Peterson, vice president of the worldwide public sector at AWS.

Read on to learn what you missed in each of the Summit keynotes.

AWS Summit New Delhi

Innovating national platforms to extend citizen services

Work in the Indian region focuses in three areas: innovating using national platforms, enabling the next generation of builders, and bridging the digital divide. “Solving for national scale opportunities requires long-term thinking—across data, applications, research, innovation, and citizen outcomes,” said Rahul Sharma, president of India public sector at AWS, as he opened the keynote at the AWS Summit New Delhi. He shared the story of CoWIN, a world class vaccination facilitation solution created in record time with AWS. When it first launched, 1.9 million people accessed the system. On September 17, 2021, CoWIN recorded 22.5 million vaccinations in one day, marking a historic milestone for India’s vaccination effort.

Shri Jayesh Ranjan, principal secretary at the Information Technology, Electronics & Communications Department of the government of Telangana, India, took the stage to share his organization’s journey to the cloud. Their cloud-first strategy helped them successfully migrate and improve their citizen services. Their work included a cloud adoption strategy and framework, capacity building, migration, and a cloud centre of excellence.

Enabling builders to create next generation solutions

India has one of the largest developer user bases in the world and the third largest startup network. This network is augmented and supported by large scale government programs like the National Skills Development Center (NSDC).

NSDC is a nonprofit from India’s Ministry of Finance with a mission to promote the development of skills among Indian learners through the creation of large vocational institutions. NSDC needed a scalable, agile cost-effective technology platform for catering to the skilling and re-skilling needs of more than 400 million people in India. NSDC uses AWS to run applications for their Skill India Portal learning management system (LMS), Skill Management and Accreditation of Training Centers (SMART), Takshashila Portal for Training of Trainers/Assessors, as well as its enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems.

Shri Abhishek Singh, president and chief executive officer (CEO) of National eGovernance Division (NeGD), CEO of MyGov, and managing director and CEO of Digital India Corporation, shared how his organizations use the cloud to support digital transformation at scale. Digital India Corporation, a nonprofit organization set up by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) in the Government of India, develops and supports software products that can scale to support India’s growing population. These products include the Aadhaar identity platform, the largest biometrics-based ID system in the world, which helps citizens gain access to government services and more. The cloud has played a key role in their digital transformation journey, making new technologies like artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), blockchain, and internet of things (IoT) simpler to adopt. Cloud allows Digital India Corporation to scale, experiment with low upfront investment, and deploy large applications like CoWIN in a matter of minutes—making the replication of such initiatives much simpler and faster.

Bridging the digital divide

In India, AWS is helping public sector organizations bridge the digital divide, to drive access and inclusion for all. This includes work with startup CropIn, an agriculture technology (AgTech) company in India. Cropin uses AWS to drive improvements in farming practices with data-driven insights. Using AWS, Cropin has successfully brought seven million farmers into the digital fold and digitized over 16 million acres of farmland globally.

Professor Sanjeev Singh, joint director of the University of Delhi South Campus, took the stage to share the story of the Samarth eGov Suite, a purpose-built platform for higher education institutions (HEIs) that uses AWS to deploy an e-governance system for administration and management of higher education processes. The research-driven product—developed with universities for universities and HEIs—is an open source and open standard-enabled technology stack, so there is no infrastructure and IT overhead. The service supports a simpler, faster experience for students and faculty through one interface, and helps administration get real-time insights to improve the experience for users. More than 200 institutions are already using the platform, which has already handled more than 7.5 million student records and 7.6 million registration admissions.

AWS Summit Singapore

Investing in a digital ASEAN

Elsie Tan, country manager for worldwide public sector at AWS, opened up the AWS Summit Singapore keynote by highlighting how AWS’s continued investment in the ASEAN region is driving innovation in the public sector. “Since the launch of the Singapore Region in 2010, AWS has invested over $6.51 billion US dollars in local infrastructure,” said Elsie. In 2021, the region launched the first Cloud Innovation Center (CIC) in Singapore, which works with public sector agencies to identify pressing social challenges, test new ideas, and develop industry-focused solutions. And, in 2022 alone, AWS created 1,000 jobs in Singapore. And this is just the beginning, with AWS looking to the future to continue to invest in resources to help organizations grow and unlock the potential of the cloud.

Driving digital transformation across ASEAN

AWS customers in ASEAN who migrated to AWS have seen up to a reduction in time-to-market for new features and applications for citizens, less IT costs compared to using on-premises solutions, and improved employee efficiency and operational resilience. For example, Bali in Indonesia is transforming into a smart island with AWS services. One of the many initiatives in the cloud includes revamping queue systems at local hospitals and public health centers to shorten waiting times. Singapore’s Changi Airport Group is using its DIVA Digital Factory to help travelers comply with changing travel regulations, making them feel safer during their travels. AWS is committed to helping cities across the ASEAN enable more resilient, liveable, and sustainable smart cities.

“To support the wave of innovation across ASEAN, a digitally-trained workforce will be key to unlocking the economic potential in the region,” said Eric Conrad, regional managing director, ASEAN, public sector. Since 2017, AWS has trained over 700,000 individuals across ASEAN. In 2020, AWS committed to providing 29 million people around the world with access to no-cost cloud computing skills training by 2025.

Helping the public sector deliver modernized citizen services

“As we move into the next normal, it will be critical for organizations to continue to adapt to meet the needs of students, citizens, patients, and end customers,” said Peter Moore, regional managing director of Asia and Japan at AWS.

The Government Technology Agency of Singapore (GovTech) builds on the agility and performance of the AWS Cloud to drive social impact for constituents. The organization engineers digital government to improve lives and leverage the opportunity of technology for Singapore. “We have migrated close to 60% of our workloads in our government to the [cloud],” said Chan Cheow Hoe, government chief digital technology officer at GovTech.

Chan discussed key steps of cloud migration. A first step is to understand the different risks involved, and clearly communicate to leaders throughout an organization what these risks are and how to plan for them. Secondly, the team needs a capable team to understand the stack and be able to identify and solve problems as needed, once the system is up and running. Thirdly, use cloud native tools to make maintenance simpler and more effective. And finally, “Never stop exploring—it will only get better,” said Chan.

Transforming customer experiences with technology

Global technology and engineering group ST Engineering uses artificial intelligence and machine learning (ML) to power autonomous security robot solutions to businesses across several industries. “Digital transformation is not about technology. Digital transformation marks a rethinking of how we transform and enhance stakeholder experiences using technology, people, and processes,” said Rajagopal, senior vice president and general manager of mission software and services at ST Engineering. “Organizations need to adopt an outcome-based data-first approach in solutioning.”

Rajagopal shared how ST Engineering migrated more than 1,000 workloads into the cloud, enabled by in-house cloud practitioners. Their migration to the cloud is estimated to achieve more than 20% cost savings over a 10 year period; they also reduced the time to spin off new workloads by almost 30%. ST Engineering communicates with their officers securely and efficiently worldwide with low latency on AWS. The organization built cloud microservices for customers on AWS’s CI/CD cloud pipeline, and can migrate to AWS Outposts. “While emerging tech and revamped processes are crucial, having the right skills on staff is essential to any digital transformation,” said Rajagopal.

Supporting public sector goals with AWS

Digital transformation on AWS helps public sector organizations enhance the customer experience. It also helps organizations remain secure, to keep critical systems up and running while making sure data is protected—so students can learn, citizens can access key government services, employees can work remotely, and individuals can receive healthcare. Digital transformation with AWS supports customers in reaching their sustainability goals, given that hyperscale cloud infrastructure is five times more energy efficient than the average enterprise data center in APAC. With AWS, customers in ASEAN are finding new and better ways to deliver on their missions.

Learn more about AWS for the public sector in India and AWS for the public sector in ASEAN.