Reaching these figures will mean more than doubling the US$ 2.3 billion per year in 2021, according to forecasts from the IDC consultancy that were shared by AWS executives at a press conference, during AWS re:invent 2022, which takes place this week. in Las Vegas, with coverage by Convergencialatina. 

Of the estimated US$4.9 billion, US$1,828 will correspond to Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), US$1,073 million to Platforms as a Service (PaaS) and US$2,010 million to Software as a Service (SaaS). 

It is estimated that 65% of government agencies are in an early state of digital maturity, said John Davies, AWS Director WWPS LCC Sales, for whom the digital transformation process must be focused on the citizen. In terms of complex economic situations, in addition to the agility to provide digital services, the savings that contracting Cloud services gains weight. 

Regarding the specific demand for the more than 200 AWS services and their multiple combinations, Andrés Tahta, AWS Director Latam WWPS Sales, observes that the government area begins by adopting basic services such as computing capacity, storage or databases to achieve reduction cost, agility and scalability. It then incorporates more sophisticated products like Analytics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence, which add value to the cloud. However, Tahta stressed, each entity is a case in itself. 

The pandemic accelerated the adoption of the cloud and, from the concepts expressed in the talk, it can be synthesized that there are three contracting dynamics: governments that move with a start-up mentality and agility towards the cloud; a contagion effect, where those who implemented successful initiatives are taken as references by other administrative areas; and finally, environments in which they still need to dispel myths about what can and cannot be done in the cloud, especially when there are regulatory doubts or there are no established frameworks.

Although the panel did not focus on regulatory issues, Tahta noted that countries such as Colombia have a correct regulatory framework that facilitates cloud adoption for government entities, as well as contractual vehicles such as Colombia Compra Eficiente, which contribute. 

In little more than 10 years of AWS in the region, its footprint in the government sector extends from municipalities, through national administrations and judicial powers. In the latter case, AWS has the DigiJustice program, and as indicated by Abby Daniel, AWS Director, LCC Programs, they work with some Latin American early adopters.

During the conference AWS mentioned some use cases and benefits of the cloud:

 -City of Buenos Aires: Smartmation uses AWS Cloud for the intelligent lighting solution, through which it manages 100% of the district's luminaires. This solution allowed a 50% reduction in energy consumption, 40% reduction in maintenance complaints, among other indicators.

 -Municipality of Córdoba: In two months it migrated its mainframe to the cloud with a 90% cost reduction and improved downtime indicators: these could reach 50, 60 days a year, and since migrated to the cloud have 99.99% availability.

 -Bogotá: The SIGAB system for monitoring the service provided by the city's sanitation concessionaires uses AWS to monitor 588 garbage collectors.

 -Michoacán: The Mexican state with 3 million vehicles needed to coordinate the change of license plate: for this they used AWS services that allowed the approval process of the license change to be reduced from 4 hours to 20 minutes.

 Brazil

 -Health system: The Datasus public health system uses AWS so that citizens, doctors and entities can access their health data.

-Brazil 2022 Elections: The National Electoral Institute used AWS services for the two rounds of the last elections, managing traffic peaks of 1.5 million requests per second to consult the results. They benefited from the ability of the cloud to contract capacities on demand and as events that only take place every so many years, they are an ideal case to take advantage of the elasticity of the cloud.

 Chile 

-Universal bonus: The Social Welfare Institute used AWS to set up the consultation platform in 6 days where citizens consult the amount available for the universal bonus.

-Referendum: During the referendum on the constitutional reform, AWS was used for the platform that allowed citizens to consult the place where they should cast their vote.