Will AWS Disrupt Indian Public Sector?

Teresa Carlson leads the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Worldwide Public Sector business, which includes state, local, central and regional governments; educational institutions and Ed Techs, and non-profits and non-governmental organizations (NGO), and acts as an advisor to Amazon Public Policy on global policy issues. Since starting AWS’s public sector business in 2010, Carlson has driven the business’ growth, which today accounts for 2,000 government, 4,500 education, and 17,500 nonprofit customers, and a vast partner ecosystem across all geographies.

Prior to joining AWS, Carlson served as Vice President of Microsoft Federal Government, where she was responsible for defining the strategy for the company’s US Federal Government business. Before moving into technology, Carlson worked in health care, as a practitioner and consultant initially, then as a business manager and area vice president, responsible for national accounts, marketing, and business development.

In an interaction with DATAQUEST, Teresa speaks on AWS and its traction in the Public Sector and the compelling need for the Government vertical to adopt cloud to improve efficiencies.Excerpts.

Public Sector IT demands are unique given the scale. Is cloud an ideal choice?

Absolutely. Public Sector today is at the cusp. The very fact that they need to reach out to the people by offering quick and easy access to services makes Cloud the ideal candidate for their IT needs. But to do that, they need to improve efficiencies and Cloud is a natural choice. They can experiment on the Cloud and given the agility and elasticity they can fail fast, recover fast - they are not acquiring any tech assets- and in the end create a very robust infrastructure. Now that AWS has launched a region in Mumbai, Public Sector here can leverage AWS’ expertise and benefit from it.

How can Cloud disrupt Government Services?

Per Se India, I see huge opportunities going forward. For instance, the current Government’s digital push augurs well for Cloud. With initiatives like skill development and the whole lot of activities here in India makes Cloud an ideal choice. Moreover, Cloud gives a solid IT backbone with no major CAPEX. Clearly by leveraging Cloud, Government departments can expand both G2G and G2C services and also hasten innovation across the nation.

Why AWS for Government?

Well, our traction in the Government vertical is very huge. We have a very broad set of skills and capabilities and have a million active customers in about 190 countries. Moreover our religious focus on customer satisfaction combined with our years of experience right from ‘Web Services’ times to what we now call as Cloud computing has given us huge leverage in the market and no one understands ‘Government Cloud’ better than AWS. This makes us the ideal Cloud partner for the Government.

Is Security a bottleneck?

At AWS we have the industry’s leading security compliance, standards, and certifications that make for absolute data sovereignty. With technologies like ‘Direct Connect’ and ‘Virtual Private Cloud’, we have taken security to a whole new level. For instance, Direct Connect is a network service that provides an alternative to using the Internet to utilize AWS Cloud services. Using AWS Direct Connect, data that would have previously been transported over the Internet can now be delivered through a private network connection between AWS and your datacenter or corporate network. While Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) enables you to launch AWS resources into a virtual network that you've defined. We also have class leading encryption techniques. All these make AWS the most secured Cloud platform for Governments to host their range of mission critical services.

On Innovation

The pace of innovation at AWS is unprecedented. In 2015 alone we launched 722 new services, and this will touch almost 1000 this year. Over 90% of these innovations happen out of customer feedback. And this gives a sense of our customer orientation and focus.

What are your priorities the next 12 months in India?

Given the Government’s digital push we will align our resources more in sync with digital agenda. Another priority is to deepen our mandates here and create a deep partner ecosystem. We are extremely bullish about AWS’ growth here in India.