Amazon Web Services (AWS) launched its AWS Public Sector Generative AI Impact Initiative last week during the AWS Summit in Washington, DC. As part of the two-year initiative, public sector companies will receive support in terms of cloud infrastructure and generative AI services to help them upgrade existing and new missions.
“Security is our top priority. It’s the foundation of how we support customers worldwide. And public sector customers trust AWS. They trust us to maintain the integrity of their most sensitive assets and their most sensitive missions. We prioritise governance while exploring and incorporating emerging technologies, like generative AI,” said Dave Levy, the vice president of the world public sector at AWS.
Levy told AIM that the inclination of public sector organisations to trust AWS is because of AWS’ focus on trust itself.
“Security is critical internally and so, that’s also true of our customers. It gives them a level of comfort with us, that we are going to be transparent, and that their data and their enterprise is very important to us,” he said.
But this isn’t the only reason why AWS has gained the trust of several global public sector organisations.
An Early Player
In the early 2010s, AWS was one of several pioneers that began offering their services to government agencies, starting with the launch of AWS GovCloud, which was specifically tailored for government organisations, in line with regulations.
Subsequently, AWS became one of the few companies that continuously focused on offering cloud services to the public sector, which was especially important as the US government started switching to cloud computing in the mid-2010s.
This led to receiving contracts from multiple government agencies, including the CIA, which secured their services for a massive $600 million contract way back in 2013. In the present day, AWS is currently working on establishing the AWS European Sovereign Cloud by 2025, with a whopping €7.9 billion investment.
AWS has been at the forefront of allowing public sector organisations to actively shift to cloud computing from legacy on-premise physical servers, allowing for overall better storage solutions.
With a lead in cloud computing within the US, AWS quickly seemed to become the go-to cloud provider for several countries, including India where public sector organisations leverage AWS’ capabilities in the fields of agriculture, healthcare and education.
So far, AWS has partnered with organisations and ministries like MeitY, the health and family welfare ministry, and the Telangana and Madhya Pradesh governments, as well as several universities and the National Skill Development Corporation.
Highlighting this, Levy said that India remains a core market for the company. “India is very important to us. We’ve made a lot of investments over the years. We’ve been here for a long, long time, and it’s also a very exciting market for us. We see a lot of opportunity for AWS and for our team working with the public sector,” he said.
In line with this, AWS very recently launched Amazon Bedrock for the Mumbai region during the AWS Summit held in Bengaluru in May this year. This inclusion of Mumbai means that customers from the region can build applications using Amazon’s in-house foundation models, as well as models from Anthropic, Cohere and Meta.
“In fact, Bedrock landed in Mumbai before it landed here [Washington]. So India is a very important place for us,” he said.
In AWS, We Trust
Despite its history, however, Levy is right in saying that AWS is able to abide by the strict privacy and security requirements set out by public sector organisations. AWS and its competitors in Microsoft and Google have comprehensive write-ups on the policies employed in collaborating with the public sector.
However, its early lead in the market, as well as the fact that it has continuously held a majority of the market (31% as of May 2024) when it comes to providing cloud infrastructure services, means that AWS is often the first choice when public sector organisations look to shift cloud computing.
Now, with their recent partnership with Accenture and Anthropic, wherein AWS will provide cloud infra services to Accenture’s customers, this market share is likely to increase, overtaking players like Microsoft.
Interestingly, this deal also comes at a time when it seems like Microsoft had been gaining headway in catching up with AWS in terms of cloud computing, as its share had increased this year, while AWS’ had decreased by one per cent. However, its recent partnership with Oracle, integrating Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, implies that there might be some gaps in Microsoft Azure’s functioning that only OCI can solve.
Meanwhile, AWS Outposts allows extended capabilities to provide on-premises private cloud services for their customers, adding another layer of security to an already secure product.
Nevertheless, it seems that Microsoft has a long way to go, with AWS remaining the first choice for many public sector organisations, thanks to its current lead in the market, basically proving that customers, public and otherwise, are more likely to trust AWS with their data.
As Levy said, “We’re convinced that responsibility drives trust, and trust drives adoption, and adoption drives innovation.”
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