There's a sea change in public sector cloud in India: AWS' Rahul Sharma

Digital India's mindset acted as a catalyst to bring this transformation of citizen-facing services, says Rahul Sharma, Regional Head, AWS India

Provider of on-demand cloud computing and API platforms, Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced earlier in September that it had invested $3.71 billion in local infrastructure and jobs across India since the launch of its Asia Pacific (Mumbai) Region in 2016. AWS has built the backend of the government's ambitious projects, like Digital India, CoWIN, and Common Service Centres. Rahul Sharma, Regional Head, AWS India and South Asia, in an interview with Sourabh Lele, explains the company's expansion plans to further its partnership with the central and state governments of India. Edited excerpts:

How is cloud adoption by government authorities in India improving citizen-facing services?

One of the best things that the cloud offers is the ability to experiment and iterate at the lowest possible costs. I remember the example of the Manipur state data centre, where they had so many different types of hardware in their data centre. Because of this, launching a new application could take up to months. When they moved to AWS cloud, they shortened this cycle to days. They didn't have to worry about the hardware they had to maintain.

Digital India's mindset acted as a catalyst to bring this transformation of citizen-facing services. India offers an unparalleled scale. There is tremendous opportunity in healthcare, national digital health mission, vaccination, and population-scale interventions needed in nutrition, agriculture, skilling, and education. Cloud can fulfil the need for scale and elasticity required for citizen-facing applications.

How do you see the momentum of cloud adoption in public sector organisations in India?

There has been a sea change in the adoption of cloud-based services in the past five years. A platform like CoWIN was a game changer for the industry. It is very close to my heart due to the kind of impact it had. The ability to scale up to such a big level in a matter of a few weeks has opened the eyes of not just the health ecosystem but across the board. If you see the CoWIN website, it seems very simple from its user interface, but the entire complexity sits in the backend. All these benefits helped accelerate the adoption of the cloud during the pandemic.

Out of all the fast-growing sectors in an emerging market like India, why do you think the public sector is attractive for your business?

The public sector globally exists with a charter to make public institutions successful in their quest to make a positive impact in the lives of citizens. It's more about making sure that we can work closely with governments because they need technology to apply. The opportunity to make an impact is huge in the public sector. We work across enterprises, startups, and commercial organisations. But the government should not be precluded from the stack of innovation when use cases are there.

The government often leads tech innovation when you think about the Internet of Things, machine learning, and artificial intelligence. On one end, there are massive national programmes that are happening. But, diving deeper into these programmes, you will see multiple initiatives anchored around one common theme. That's where the cloud and AWS would be relevant. 

How does AWS plan to expand its capacity in India, and how will it help the public sector?

We plan to launch a new AWS region in Hyderabad this year. The new AWS Asia Pacific (Hyderabad) Region will consist of three Availability Zones at launch. The new region will enable even more developers, startups, and enterprises as well as government, education, and non-profit organisations to run their applications and serve end users from data centers located in India. This will provide customers with more flexibility and choice while allowing them to architect their infrastructure for even greater fault tolerance, resiliency, and availability across geographic locations.