By Nishant Arora

Washington, Jun 21 (IANS): The vast Indian public sector will embark on a true digital journey only once the government decides to relax old procurement rules, make the stakeholders aware of benefits of Cloud and get rid of the ageing IT infrastructure, a top Amazon Web Services (AWS) executive has stressed.

According to Peter Moore, Regional Managing Director, Public Sector-Asia Pacific at AWS, which is Amazon's growing Cloud computing business, governments around the world including in India are grappling with massive loss of data owing to old hardware and software, badly designed IT architecture and poor operating practices in terms of accessing the data.

"Any major transformation in technology requires people to change and India is no different. It has cultural as well as technological challenges when it comes to embracing Cloud. Addressing tech challenges is easy but making people want to do something different is the difficult part," Moore told IANS in an interview on the sidelines of the AWS public sector summit here.

Civil servants, he said, can't be forced to learn Cloud computing faster or convinced easily to replace legacy IT infrastructure and reskilling the workforce can only change the scenario.

"We would like to help the government design effective procurement vehicles that cut long paperwork aligned with traditional hardware purchasing," emphasised Moore, who is driving government agencies, educational institutions and non-profits implement AWS Cloud computing services.

In India, AWS is listed as Amazon Internet Services Pvt Ltd (AISPL) which undertakes the resale and marketing of AWS Cloud services in the country.

In order to make deeper inroads, Moore doesn't want to waste time on customers who don't plan to begin their Cloud journey despite continued efforts.

"There is so much opportunity in India. It won't be wise of us to waste efforts on customers who don't move say for years despite the best of our efforts. We are seeking customers who are ready to go with us now.

"We are customer-obsessed and more than eager to give them best advice when it comes to either migrating workloads to Cloud or building something entirely new," Moore said.

AWS has a long list of government customers in India but feels there is a long way to go when it comes to achieving its full potential.

"There is a lot of talk within the Indian government agencies about the success they have had after moving to Cloud. We have all the capabilities that meet the government standards. We have already passed all the tests -- be it scalability, agility or security," Moore told IANS.

AWS is the first Global Cloud Provider (GCP) in the country to achieve full empanelment by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) for delivering Cloud services to government customers.

The company successfully completed the Standardisation Testing and Quality Certification (STQC) audit from MeitY for Cloud services last year.

The company launched AWS Asia Pacific (Mumbai) Region with two availability zones in 2016 and has seen stupendous growth in adding new customers in the region.

"For AWS, Cloud computing means that you don't need to pay upfront and pay only what you consume, scale up and scale down as you need. This is the reason for our tremendous success in a short span of time," Moore informed.

He sees a real momentum in the Indian tech landscape, especially in the start-up segment.

"Almost all the start-ups in India would not have been start-ups without access to AWS. They are not asking us should we move to Cloud but how to move. There is a real pent-up demand coming from India," the AWS executive emphasised.

Exponential growth is right around the corner in the public sector, he said, adding that AWS, which has invested a lot for years in setting up right infrastructure in India, is now ready to reap the results.

"We will continue to work to make procurement process easier as it is the key roadblock. We will continue to develop our capacities, add new capabilities and invest significantly in the country towards training, skilling and building resources," Moore noted.