BPPTIK Kominfo Bridges the Digital Skills Gap with LMS on AWS

Indonesia aims to create a pool of about nine million digital professionals by 2030 as part of the nation’s digital transformation agenda. Helping the country achieve its goal is the Information and Communication Technology Training and Development Center (BPPTIK), part of the Ministry of Communications and Informatics Indonesia (Kominfo).

BPPTIK Kominfo conducts class-based and online learning programs for civil servants and citizens in areas such as application programming, database design, and network administration. It supervises the programs using a Moodle Learning Management System (LMS) but was concerned about a lack of reliability, flexibility, and security with the system’s on-premises infrastructure.

BPPTIK Kominfo wanted to move the Moodle LMS to a more reliable and secure cloud service and chose Amazon Web Services (AWS). However, the IT team didn’t have the confidence to migrate its legacy infrastructure to AWS and lacked the knowledge and skills to run a cloud-based solution. Hamdani Pratama, head of planning and evaluation at BPPTIK Kominfo, says, “As part of the ministry delivering the president’s vision to grow Indonesia’s digital talent, we have to ensure that we have the right systems behind us and also the right skill sets for those systems.”

BPPTIK Kominfo worked with AWS Training and Certification to get its employees up to speed on cloud knowledge. Through self-paced digital and virtual instructor-led AWS training, dozens of employees participated in the AWS Cloud Practitioner Essentials, AWS Technical Essentials, and Architecting on AWS courses. The AWS training gave employees confidence and a foundational knowledge of AWS services. BPPTIK Kominfo learned how to optimize on AWS and about the range of AWS solutions available. Moreover, team members went away with a deep understanding of AWS best practices. Pratama says, “Courses were a mix of theory and practice, and they were delivered in Bahasa, which made it a fruitful experience for our employees.”

After completing AWS training, BPPTIK Kominfo knew that the AWS Cloud was indeed the right decision for the organization and collaborated with AWS Partner Elitery to successfully complete the migration. To ensure reliability and flexibility, the team migrated the system’s applications to Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances and its MySQL database to Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS). For security and protection, it deployed both resources inside an Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) with an AWS Web Application Firewall (AWS WAF) for protection from common web exploits and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) for backups. “With AWS Training and Certification, our team has a better understanding of AWS services and the ability to move our legacy LMS system to the AWS Cloud,” says Pratama.

With Moodle LMS now on AWS, BPPTIK Kominfo can deliver its class-based and online learning programs in areas such as application programming and database design to an increasing number of students. In fact, BPPTIK is on track to equip 10,000 professionals with digital skill sets by the end of 2021, and Pratama believes the center will increase this figure to 40,000 by 2022. This growth is possible because the AWS infrastructure can easily scale to handle simultaneous LMS connections. Pratama says, “We increased the maximum number of concurrent users from 200 to 5,000 just by making the initial switch to Moodle LMS on AWS.”

On AWS, besides increasing its capabilities to support virtual learning, BPPTIK Kominfo has reduced the total cost of ownership (TCO) by 50 percent compared to its on-premises infrastructure. Moreover, service availability has increased by more than 80 percent and the IT team can manage the system remotely, which helps eliminate downtime. Pratama says, “Instructors can upload course materials to the LMS without delays resulting from a home broadband connection, and students are accessing and uploading content without any challenges. I’ve received no complaints.”