Singapore Moves Public Sector Websites To AWS

Singapore is going all in! The Singapore government has picked up pace of its AWS migration, which began in 2016, and has now moved a number of public sector websites to the cloud platform.

Sites like onemap.sg and mytransport.sg are among the 380 public agency portals that have made the tradition to the Amazon Web Services platform, with a forecast that by the end of 2017, no less than 400 websites will be on AWS.

Tan Eng Peng, the senior director of the GovTech Agency, said that the move to AWS provided the public sector not only faster development, but economies of scale as well:

“In seven days, a portal is ready to be published. Through this central management and integration, we’ve saved manpower, cost and time.”

He was speaking at a recent AWS Public Sector Summit.

This is among the first initiatives of the Singaporean government of using the public cloud, part of its efforts to improve efficiency, timeliness and cost advantage to government agencies.

Previously, individual agencies used to buy their own hardware, software and networking services, and then had to ensure that security patches were done regularly. These were important processes, but also resource intensive.

And AWS has taken over them now.

With this switch, all that these public agencies have to do is provide their content, and the cloud developers pick a content management system for use on AWS, and rapidly deploy it for testing and security checks, before publishing it live.

No wonder the government has had much success to report.