Cloud computing is now serving as a potential enabler of digital transformation among organisations to make them agile to cope with the pressing challenges and volatility in the changing world, according to cloud powerhouse Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Vatsun Thirapatarapong, country manager at AWS Thailand
These cloud-powered organisations can play a significant role in improving quality of life for people and ensuring sustainability in the world.
“Agility is the heart of organisations today regardless of whether they are public or private agencies, which can ensure flexibility, innovation creation and better life in the new normal amid the complexity of the pandemic, economic challenges and geopolitics,” Vatsun Thirapatarapong, country manager at AWS Thailand, told the Bangkok Post.
Cloud computing can play an instrumental role in building organisational resilience amid a series of pressing challenges, such as the pandemic and economic volatility. The shortage of chipsets, which affects the production of computer servers and related hardware, is also driving many organisations to migrate their workload to the cloud, he said.
Many organisations found it important to experiment their new ideas and innovation on the cloud instead of waiting for several months to purchase new hardware before doing so, Mr Vatsun said. This could push the new innovation to get off ground much faster.
The cloud also supports the scalability of businesses that see the opportunity of the target market in the regional and global level.
AWS’S CLOUD POWER
Digital innovation plays a crucial role in enhancing digital inclusion covering a wide range of sectors, including finance, education and healthcare, thereby leveling up people’s quality of life, Mr Vatsun said.
In the financial sector, Thailand’s loan amounts to 14 trillion baht, 12 trillion of which was contributed by banks, 1 trillion by non-bank entities and 1 trillion by loan sharks.
AWS supports Thailand’s fintech firm Monix to launch digital lending app Finnix in 2021 to enable Thai workers and small entrepreneurs to have access to instant nano loans.
In education frontier, AWS is powering local EdTech startup Vonder to provide gamification in education with digital learning. It also supports OpenDurian, an online tutoring service provider, to cater for people’s continuous learning.
In healthcare services, AWS’s cloud powers telemedicine services provided by Doctor Raksa app.
Mr Vatsun said three foundation steps are necessary for organisations to drive tech inclusion.
The first lies in security realm. AWS supports 90 global security standards and compliance certifications and offers 230 security features as AWS is the world’s first cloud service provider.
“We have data secured with encryption and we comply with GDRP (General Data Protection Regulation),” said Mr Vatsun.
“Shared responsibility is needed to ensure security. We firmly secure our platform while customers have to ensure security in their environment too,” said Mr Vatsun.
The second involves app modernisation by embracing Artificial Intelligence (AI), machine learning, Internet of Things (IoT), automation and localisation strategy. The move can level up business agility and innovation creation.
For instance, Amazon SageMaker Studio unifies all the tools needed for machine learning development, in which developers can write codes, track experiments, visualise data as well as perform debugging and monitoring all within a single integrated visual interface, which significantly boosts the developers’ productivity, he said.
AWS IoT TwinMaker meanwhile makes it easier for developers to create digital twins of real-world systems, such as buildings, factories, industrial equipment and production lines.
The third phase concerns further enhancement of technology and sustainability focus, Mr Vatsun said.
Cloud services can support specific industry needs. For instance, AWS FinSpace offers data management and analytics services for the financial industry, which can help clients reduce their time finding and preparing petabytes of financial data for analysis from months to minutes.
“Banks can add more dimension from the third-party sources of data across sectors, ranging from weather forecast to electricity bill payment and mobile phone bills for credit risk assessment,” Mr Vatsun said.
In the healthcare frontier, Amazon HealthLake leverages machine learning to understand and extract medical information from unstructured data, which can shed light on the health conditions of the patients as well as the population’s health.
According to Mr Vatsun, AWS also supports sustainability solutions in the usage of its cloud services. Customers will be equipped with solutions to learn how they can conserve energy to support their sustainable journey.
The majority of organisations are in the first and second steps with very few in the third phase.
SUSTAINABILITY MISSION
AWS is focused on efficiency and continuous innovation across its global infrastructure, as the company is moving forward with a plan to power its operations with 100% renewable energy by 2025, quicker than the firm’s earlier target at 2030, said Mr Vatsun.
In 2020, AWS became the world’s largest corporate purchaser of renewable energy, reaching 65% renewable energy across its business.
“It is our goal to reach net-zero carbon by 2040,” said Mr Vatsun. “We will see a twin transformer regarding both innovation and sustainability.”
The company’s efforts to level up energy conservation has resulted in the production of Graviton 3 processors, which can reduce power consumption by 25-40%, he said.
AWS also offers its cloud-based tools for calculating carbon footprint from the workload, he noted.
According to a report by 451 Research, which surveyed 400 organisations in the US, AWS’s infrastructure was 3.6 times more energy efficient than the medium of surveyed enterprise data centres.
CLOUD-DRIVEN TRANSFORMATION
According to Mr Vatsun, AWS’s focus in the Thai market is to educate customers on how the cloud could drive their digital transformation. It is also committed to enhancing cloud skills for customers.
He said cloud skills are not just the issue for organisations’ IT departments, but also anyone in business who wants to formulate their own tools. For example, pilots can use coding tools powered by AI to create their optimised air flight routing.
He also suggested organisations speed up transformation in the post-pandemic world as tools and technology resources are now available.
“Business needs to choose the right skill partners to help them transform to jump into this bandwagon,” said Mr Vatsun. “As AWS is an innovation company, we think every day is day one, meaning that we are enthusiastic about learning new knowledge and gaining new experience. Comfort zone needs to be averted so as to drive improvement.”
AWS has also partnered with SiS Distribution Thailand as a cloud reseller to widen the firm’s ecosystem from mainly medium organisations to small ones.
“In 2021 alone, AWS added 3,084 services and features. With new partners, we can offer new update features to serve their users,” said Mr Vatsun.
LOCAL TOUCH AND SERVICES
According to Mr Vatsun, Thailand is an important market for AWS and the company aims to provide services to meet the local needs.
In February, 2022, AWS announced plans to launch a new AWS Local Zone in Bangkok.
AWS Local Zones are a type of infrastructure deployment that places AWS compute, storage, database, and other services at the edge of the cloud near large population, industry and information technology (IT) centers, which enables customers to deploy applications that require single-digit millisecond latency closer to end users or on-premises data centers.
The move will compliment AWS’s existing Amazon Cloudfront and AWS Outposts locations in Bangkok.
Video streaming, gaming and the work in relation to augmented reality and virtual reality (AR/VR) are stand to benefit from this development, Mr Vatsun added.
