MADRID, March 23 (Portaltic/EP) –
The Spanish Public Administrations have intensified their modernization and digitization processes, which have become a “political priority, in the context of the ambitious objectives and budgets of the European Digital Strategy,” says the head of business development for the Public Sector at Spain of Amazon Web Services (AWS), Alejandro Pinto.
The growing adoption of the cloud is presented as “a common element and fundamental pillar” of the digitization strategies of Administrations at all levels, as it offers agility, scalability, security, innovation capacity and cost optimization.
Public organizations rely on the cloud “to offer more agile and personalized services to citizens”, as Pinto explains in an interview with Europa Press, but it also helps them “innovate quickly, experiment repeatedly with new digital services , without incurring the large costs that traditional technologies used to imply”.
These are objectives that do not differ from those of the private sector, although the manager affirms that the public sector has “certain peculiarities and unique processes, especially when it comes to managing contracting processes and interacting between the various administrations.”
From AWS they have also identified that public sector customers are “especially interested in accelerating digitization in a sustainable way.” In this sense, Pinto defends that “companies in Spain can reduce energy use by more than 80% when they run their applications in the AWS cloud, instead of operating their own data centers.”
“In health, and usually linked to compliance with specific regulations, we also observe that our clients prefer that their data be hosted in Spanish territory,” he reveals. For this reason, the company decided to invest in a new infrastructure Region in Spain, located in Aragon, which came into operation in mid-November 2022.
However, there are still challenges for public organizations to migrate their operations to the cloud, although “they are not of a technical nature, but cultural”, he qualifies. In this context, he considers that “it is vital” that “the management teams of each organization lead and get involved in the digital transformation in the cloud, and that they provide their teams with the necessary technical training, so that they participate and feel involved in it.” migration to the cloud.
IMPACT ON THE CITIZENSHIP EXPERIENCE
Citizens also benefit from the leap to the cloud. “A trend that we observe is the use of advanced cloud technologies to resolve situations that have a direct impact on the improvement of daily services to citizens,” says the manager. As an example, he cites the application of the Madrid Regional Transport Consortium, which uses AWS technology to make it possible to recharge transport tickets from mobile phones.
Also “the acceleration of the use of the cloud in healthcare is significant, with the aim of reducing the cost of medical care, increasing decision-making based on real data and offering more individualized medicine and a better experience for each patient” , Add.
In this sense, the Cantabrian Health Service, belonging to the Ministry of Health of the government of Cantabria, has chosen AWS to abandon its own traditional computer systems and achieve great agility in the deployment of solutions, greater security in the treatment of data and accelerate innovation in healthcare.
On the other hand, and in collaboration with the Ministry for the Ecological Transition and the Demographic Challenge and the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, they have deployed Arbaria, “a pioneering early warning system for forest fires” that helps to predict weekly, during the maximum risk campaign, the occurrence of fires and affected surfaces at the provincial and national level.
INVESTMENT THAT POSITIVELY IMPACTS THE ECONOMY
Investment in the cloud also has a positive impact on the country’s economy. If Spain meets the objectives established by the European Commission in its Digital Decade until 2030, 228,000 million euros in economic value could be generated, which is equivalent to almost 21% of the Spanish economy today, according to a study commissioned by AWS to the independent consulting firm Public First. The study also underlines that 55% of these estimated gains would depend on cloud technologies.
On the other hand, the new Region in Aragon “represents an additional investment by AWS in the country of 2,500 million euros over 10 years. We estimate that it will increase Spain’s GDP by approximately 1,800 million euros and supports more than 1,300 new full-time jobs.”
With it, customers can run workloads and store data in Spain, “something especially relevant for the public sector, in addition to satisfying the demands of some users with lower latency for their most critical applications”, and take advantage of advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, Internet of things, or mobile services.
SUPPORT INNOVATION IN THE PUBLIC SECTOR
AWS offers businesses and public sector organizations economies of scale across its 99 Availability Zones in 31 geographic regions around the world. With this, Pinto ensures that clients save costs, since the use of the AWS cloud allows them to “reduce their high fixed expenses and advance payments, transforming them into variable expenses and only pay for technology as they consume it”.
Precisely, elasticity is another value of this technology, which prevents organizations from having to overprovision themselves to ensure they have enough capacity to handle their operations at the maximum level of activity. “Now, they can provision the amount of resources they really need, knowing that they can instantly scale up or down based on their service demands,” he adds.
To keep up with the innovation that the cloud is accelerating in the public sector, AWS is also innovating to continue to grow its offering so that it can give customers “exactly what they need.” An example of this is the launch in 2021 of more than 3,000 new services and functionalities.
“We have more than 15 years of experience in developing a secure, reliable cloud platform that offers the widest variety of cloud services on the market,” says Pinto, who also points out that clients value being at the center of the culture of this company. “More than 90% of our new products are based on what we hear and learn from our own customers, and the remaining 10% are based on services we sense they need through our conversations with them.”
And he stresses that security is one of the reasons why public organizations choose AWS. This is because customers “always retain ownership and control of their content stored on AWS.” The technology firm also offers different options to encrypt data and supports 98 security standards and certifications, including the High Level National Security Scheme (ENS) certification.
