Amazon Web Services joins Telangana govt with cloud adoption framework

After working on key government projects like Digital India and COWIN, Amazon Web Services (AWS) today announced that it has joined the government of Telangana to transform its citizen service delivery by advancing its cloud adoption framework.

AWS also plans to launch a new AWS region – a physical location where AWS clusters its data centres -- in the Hyderabad region by the end of this year. The company today announced that it has invested $3.71 billion in local infrastructure and jobs across India since the launch of the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Asia Pacific (Mumbai) Region in 2016.

Rahul Sharma, Regional Head Public Sector - Amazon Internet Services Private Limited, said, “We are at an inflection point, where the needs of a population are coming together with the capabilities that India has and the scale it offers. The AWS region in Hyderabad will have three availability zones and under each zone, AWS will set up at least two data centres to start with.”

The Telangana state government has decided to migrate its information technology (IT) workloads to the cloud to accelerate its eGovernance plans, and deliver faster and more reliable citizen services through its 33 departments and 289 organizations, while achieving high-operational efficiency and reduced IT costs. 

The Aarogyasri Health Care Trust (Aarogyasri), the Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation (GHMC), and the Telangana State Department of Information Technology, Electronics, and Communications (ITE&C) are the first state organizations to migrate workloads from on-premises to AWS powered cloud system.

Jayesh Ranjan, Principal Secretary, Industries & Commerce (I&C) and Information Technology (IT), Telangana said, “As the demand for eGovernance services grows, we can easily migrate and scale our workloads reliably and securely on AWS to help districts across Telangana respond to citizen needs faster. Looking ahead, the government of Telangana aims to double down on digital transformation, improving the citizen experience by providing faster and more reliable access to services, like property tax payments.”

Max Peterson, Vice President, Worldwide Public Sector, AWS said this would be critical to allow businesses, governments, and non-profits to keep up the customer-centric innovations. "We remain committed to this ongoing investment in the region. We are well prepared to help the Indian government, enterprises, and startups with their Cloud journey in the post-Covid era, as Cloud becomes an integral part of every organisation, big or small," Peterson said.

The company said, by using AWS solutions for computing, storage, management, and governance capabilities, Telangana would empower its civil servants to enhance the delivery of citizen services, such as hospital care and property tax payments—all while reducing compute costs by 33%.

The growing demand for digital services has increased the volume of public service operational data managed by Telangana. For instance, the Aarogyasri Scheme, a free health care program serving approximately 29 million people living below the poverty line in Telangana, experienced quadruple growth in usage year over year for the past decade. The co-located space in the Telangana State Data Center could not keep pace with the demand lacking the capacity to support the program’s growth, forcing the government to undergo digital transformation.