Amazon Web Services (AWS) has become the first global Cloud service provider (CSP) to achieve full empanelment for delivering Public Cloud services to government customers in India, the company announced on Thursday.

Amazon Internet Services Pvt Ltd (AISPL), an Indian subsidiary of the Amazon Group which undertakes the resale and marketing of AWS Cloud services in India, has achieved full CSP empanelment by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY).

The government organisations and state-run banks can now increase agility and speed innovation with AWS's flexible and highly secure "pay-as-you-go" Cloud services.

"The empanelment of the AWS Cloud is paving the way for innovation so that government bodies can serve citizens more effectively, achieve scientific breakthroughs, reach broader constituents, and invest more time and resources into their core missions," said Peter Moore, Regional Managing Director, Amazon Web Services, Public Sector - Asia Pacific. 

AISPL successfully completed the STQC (Standardisation Testing and Quality Certification) audit from the MeitY for Cloud services delivered from the AWS Asia Pacific (Mumbai) Region. 

"We are excited to deepen our engagement with central, state and local governments and public sector bodies in India to offer them the broadest suite of cloud services, and a transformational approach to accelerate the deployment of digital services in the country," Moore added.

AWS public sector customers in India include Andhra Pradesh State Skill Development Corp (APSSDC), the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE), CSC e-Governance Services (set up by the Ministry of Electronics and IT), Gujarat Technical University, Indian Institute of Science (IISc) and Indian Institute of Technology, Guwahati.

By using AWS, the Quality Council of India (QCI) has expedited the accreditation process of its various projects. 

"We chose AWS as the technology platform for their massive economies of scale, support for open standards, and highly secure infrastructure. The optimisation that AWS Cloud provides has reduced costs, and boosted the security of data within India -- which is one of the prime concerns for many of our clients," said Dr Ravi P, Singh, Secretary General, QCI.

According to Dr Amit Sethi, Associate Professor, Indian Institute of Technology, Guwahati, hyper-scale Cloud platform such as AWS enables educational institutes to increase the speed of research.

"It also reduces time-to-results by running high performance computing (HPC) in the Cloud, and scaling to larger numbers of parallel tasks rapidly than would be practical in many on-premises environments," Dr Sethi added.

Since the launch of AWS Asia Pacific (Mumbai) Region in June 2016, more than 120,000 customers including Tata Motors, Lupin, Future Group and Shoppers' Stop have adopted AWS Cloud for a broad range of applications.

"Data Security Council of India (DSCI) appreciates the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology's (MeitY's) policy to promote cloud adoption in government by empaneling cloud service providers," noted Rama Vedashree, CEO, Data Security Council of India. 

MeitY has been advising government bodies and departments to procure Cloud services only from the empaneled and audit-compliant CSPs.