'AWS' Journey in the Indian Government Sector Is Just Beginning

Amazon believes that the opportunity in the government space is huge, as the cloud is perfectly suited for handling large sets of data and gain rich insights. In an interaction with Jasmine Desai, Teresa Carlson, VP, Worldwide Public Sector, Amazon Web Services (AWS), shares how Government departments can benefit from the agility and scale of cloud enabled innovations.

How can customers change their traditional IT-buying behaviour to take advantage of the benefits of the cloud services model, especially in the Government space?

The journey of government to the cloud is a bit different due to regulations and policies, procurement methods and lot of legacy infrastructure. Having a cloud first policy is one of the ways to move swiftly to the cloud. True cloud computing is the ability to get started with no upfront cost, scale as you need to, benefit from utility based pricing and scale globally. The journey in the Indian government is just beginning from an AWS perspective.

Governments have to be very clear on the security and compliance framework. For example, there is FedRAMP process in US. We have achieved every level on it. Commercial companies now are also assessing themselves against FedRAMP. It will be important for India to have a framework for security and compliance so that agencies and ministers know what they are assessing against. The most vital benefit for the government would be that once we achieve these levels, the ISVs building apps on this platform would inherit these security controls.