AWS announced first CIC, Established in India Along with NITI Aayog
By: Ashwathy Nair
- All of the organizations in government with NITI Aayog to bring innovation at scale.
- CIC in India is the first one that is in partnership with the government.
- Collaboration with AWS is very strategic and long term in nature.
An announcement by Amazon Web Services on its first Cloud Innovation Center (CIC) in India. It is being set up in India, right in their New Delhi office, along with the National Institution for Transforming India (NITI Aayog), the policy think tank of the Government of India.
Max Peterson, the Vice President, International Sales, Worldwide Public Sector, and Amazon Web Services, said: “We are announcing the very first Cloud Innovation Center in India, and the very first Cloud Innovation Center where we are directly collaborating with government, and all government organizations with NITI Aayog to bring innovation to scale”.
AWS already has 12 Cloud Innovation Centers worldwide, but in India, it is the first CIC that is in partnership with the government.
Peterson explained about CIC by saying that, “CICs allows to collaborate broadly with communities of interests, it helps them in minimizing technology costs to explore a lot of different alternatives. It helps them to increase the public sector’s number of solutions in which they can experiment. This facilitates experimentation and continuing innovation … Finally, it helps to speed up these repeatable strategies in the public sector so you might try one task and then easily duplicate it to enhance the experience for all people”.
The mission of the NITI Aayog Frontier Technologies CIC is to recognize and deploy leading-edge technologies to accelerate continuous innovation in the provision of public services. The centre will work to define and prioritize initiatives as well as partner with local leaders, including state and district level subject matter experts, to address important social issues.
Ramanan Ramanathan, NITI Aayog’s Additional Secretary, Mission Director, and Atal Innovation Mission said that “Our partnership with AWS is very strategic and long-term in nature. First and foremost, NITI Aayog and collaborating organizations will develop prototypes and solutions using advanced technologies”.
Ramanathan shared an example on the collaboration by saying that along with AWS in conceptualizing, they have started to work on the health sector and started to develop machine learning-based data intelligence systems for All India Institute of Management Systems. “For the screening of lifestyle diseases, this is an integrated medical device that is presently in scope”.
Amazon Web Services is present within 24 geographic regions in 77 (AZs) Availability Zones. Recently, they have also announced plans in order to launch 9 more AZs and three more Amazon Web Service regions in Spain, Indonesia and Japan.
