By Eric Conrad, Managing Director for AWS’s Worldwide Public Sector in ASEAN
I’m honoured to share that Amazon Web Services (AWS) has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with the Ministry of Digital Economy and Society of Thailand (MDES), to help with the digital transformation of the Thailand Government Cloud.
The MoU allows MDES and Thai government agencies to consider using AWS, with the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud offering, as part of Government Data Center and Cloud Service (GDCC), the central cloud infrastructure for government agencies. Customers will be able to leverage the breadth and depth of more than 200 fully-featured AWS Cloud services, including AWS’s industry-leading security capabilities and world-class global infrastructure, to drive innovation and cost savings in delivering advanced citizen services.
In addition, MDES will work with other Thai government agencies and AWS to identify strategic pilot workloads to run on AWS through the GDCC over the next year. The pilots will help to showcase the speed that government agencies can experiment with cloud technology to innovate and deliver their missions.
Driving innovation and local economic growth
Today’s announcement is part of AWS’s ongoing commitment to support the Thai government’s Thailand 4.0’s digital initiatives which require government and state-owned enterprises to set up digital foundations to provide more efficient services to citizens, drive local economic growth and solve some of the biggest challenges in society.
In May 2016, Amazon set up an office in Thailand to better support Amazon and AWS’s local customers. This includes employing a dedicated AWS Public Sector team of local employees on-the-ground working to drive innovation on behalf of its local public sector customers and partners, including state enterprises as well as the education and healthcare sector. Our Thailand customers include large public sector organisations such as the King Mongkhut Institute of Technology Ladkrabang (KMITL), Royal Thai Government and MDES, along with Thailand’s leading companies Ampos, Bitkub, Central Group, Kasikorn Business-Technology Group (KBTG), SCB Abacus, Robinhood, CP Food and many more.
Our extensive network of AWS Partners and startups in Thailand will help us to accelerate innovation in citizen services and better deliver on the Thai government’s missions to transform the nation into a digital economy. The AWS Partner Network (APN) includes many technology and consulting firms that can help agencies build and deliver government-specific solutions as well as support the migration of workloads to AWS. This includes many AWS Technology Partners such as local IT businesses in Thailand such as 2C2P, Omise and Amity as well as AWS Consulting Partners such as National Telecom (NT), True IDC, G-Able, Dailitech, Deloitte and Accenture.
Supporting our customers to develop digital talent
An AlphaBeta report found that 149 million workers in Asia Pacific (APAC) apply some form of digital skills in their jobs today. However, the need for advanced cloud computing and data skills in APAC is expected to triple by 2025 – the greatest increase forecasted across all digital skill competencies.
To help accelerate innovation with the Thai Government, AWS will collaborate with MDES on a skilling plan and provide support to train more than 1,200 employees with cloud skills. AWS will provide on-demand digital courses and facilitated training events, so that government employees can develop the skills needed to implement cloud technologies at scale, make better data-driven business decisions and innovate new services to drive improved outcomes for citizens.
This initiative is part of our broader commitment to help address the ICT skills gap in Thailand. AWS Training and Certification programs can help all learners, from secondary school and higher education students to adults in the workforce, acquire cloud computing skills through free online training courses to keep pace with technology advancements. To make cloud skills accessible, AWS offers over 30 free digital training courses available in Thai, with courses on topics such as cloud foundations, machine learning, data analytics, security and more.
To upskill Thailand’s future workers, we are collaborating with higher education institutions to help students build in-demand cloud skills prior to entering the workforce through AWS Academy, a free, ready-to-teach cloud computing curriculum for higher education institutions. Eight Thai higher education institutions in Bangkok, Chiang Rai and Pathum Thani have incorporated AWS Academy courses into their curriculums. We also work directly with organisations like Siam Cement Group (SCG) to help them build these in-demand cloud skills and train employees on their team.
Access to world-class public cloud infrastructure
Through the MOU, the Thai government can have access to AWS’s world-class infrastructure that spans over 26 geographic regions and 84 Availability Zones (AZs) across the globe. These include AWS Regions across APAC such as Singapore, Sydney, Mumbai, Osaka, Tokyo, Seoul and Jakarta. Our infrastructure provides customers with the broadest and deepest cloud offering of more than 200 fully featured services for compute, storage, databases, networking, analytics, machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), mobile, security, hybrid, virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR), media and application development, deployment and management.
In addition, Thailand customers can benefit from AWS’s cutting-edge computing technologies. These include Amazon CloudFront, a content delivery network service built for high performance, security and developer convenience as well as AWS Outposts, a fully managed service that extends AWS infrastructure, services, APIs and tools to customer premises. AWS plans to bring an AWS Local Zone that places compute, storage, database and other select services closer to customers for applications that require single-digit millisecond latency to end users in Bangkok.
Continuing to meet the highest security standards
AWS is highly sensitive to the security needs of our customers in every location in which we operate. Our services have been architected to be the most flexible and secure cloud computing environment available today. Our core infrastructure is built to satisfy the security requirements for military, global banks and other high-sensitivity organisations. AWS uses the same secure hardware and software to build and operate in each of our regions. Our service offerings and associated supply chain are vetted and accepted as secure enough for top-secret workloads which benefits all our customers globally.
This is backed by a deep set of cloud security tools, with more than 280 security, compliance and governance services and key features. All 117 AWS services that store customer data offer the ability to encrypt that data. AWS also supports 98 security standards and compliance certifications, more than any other offering, including PCI-DSS, HIPAA/HITECH, FedRAMP, GDPR, FIPS 140-2, SOC 1,2,3, CSA, ISO Standard and NIST 800-171, helping satisfy compliance requirements for virtually every regulatory agency around the globe.
Committed to Thailand for the long-term
Our work in Thailand over the past six years represents AWS’s long-term commitment to the government and the nation. We look forward to working with MDES, the Thai Government and our extensive network of AWS Partners to build a digitally skilled workforce, accelerate the country’s digital transformation and solve some of the biggest challenges in society.
Eric Conrad, Managing Director, Worldwide Public Sector, ASEAN, AWS, said “We are honoured to share that AWS has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with Ministry of Digital Economy and Society of Thailand (MDES) to help with the digital transformation of the Thai Government Cloud, the central cloud infrastructure for government agencies. MDES and the Thai Government will be able to leverage the breadth and depth of more than 200 fully-featured AWS Cloud services, including AWS’s industry-leading security capabilities and world-class global infrastructure, to drive innovation and cost savings in delivering advanced citizen services. AWS will also offer technology skills development programs to citizens to help the country build a digitally-skilled workforce ready to solve some of the biggest challenges in society.”