Amazon Web Services, the cloud-based solution provider from e-commerce major Amazon, expects a wider adoption of cloud from both the central and state governments for digital public infrastructure, following the successful rollout of citizen-centric services such as CoWIN, Digilocker and Umang.

Speaking on the sidelines of the Public Sector Symposium in New Delhi last Friday, Deepti Dutt, head — strategic initiatives, public sector, AWS India said there is a growing trend of cloud adoption among governments and government-owned companies, and simultaneous migration from government data centres.

“Can I predict that in the next couple of years, everything will move to the cloud and state data centres will shut down, the answer is no. But we are seeing more and more states embracing the cloud,” Dutt said.

“No one talks about building data centres for smart metering solutions.”

“Across states from agriculture, healthcare, utility, DBT (direct benefit transfer), citizen services, urban local bodies, geospatial and landscape mapping, all kinds of use cases are happening on AWS,” she said, adding the technology is already here and being developed further.

Dutt said the geospatial sector is an area where there will be an extensive adoption of cloud-based solutions with the government laying down specific milestones in the National Geospatial Policy in December.

Under the policy, the government plans to have high-resolution topographical survey and mapping (5-10 cm for urban and rural areas and 50 cm-100 cm for forests and wastelands) by 2030 and survey and mapping of sub-surface infrastructure in major cities and towns and sea surface topography of shallow/deep seas — to support Blue Economy by 2035.

“The government has allowed the private sector to collect data and we have been working with partners and start-ups to enable these kinds of projects on the ground,” Dutt said.

She said AWS is working with start-ups to develop proof of concept on how drone data can be put on a platform which can then be used for rural infrastructure planning work.

AWS is also working with another start-up to develop 3D digital maps for cities in urban India that can help deploy services such as the 5G rollout.

“We give the building blocks. It is up to the customers and partners on how to assemble and what solutions they create is completely their prerogative.

“Even if we look at geospatial as a solution, a lot of GPU processing is required for handling map data, drone data, lidar data. As a cloud platform we are ready to process all this data,” she said.

At the public sector symposium, AWS said it has collaborated with the Indian Space Research Organisation (Isro), the Indian National Space Promotion and Authorization Centre (IN-SPACe) to accelerate India’s space tech by giving space start-ups, research institutes and students access to cloud technologies.

AWS also said that it has received cloud service provider (CSP) empanelment from the Union ministry of electronic and information technology (MeitY) for cloud services provided using the AWS Asia Pacific (Hyderabad) region.

AWS further announced that the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB) in India has chosen the company as its preferred cloud provider to accelerate its genome sequencing research projects.

It was also announced that the Indian edtech social enterprise ConveGenius has built SwiftChat, a conversational AI chatbot platform, to improve learning outcomes for K12 school students using more than 53 conversational AI chatbots that deliver personalised learning content in 13 regional languages.