Government of Telangana Accelerates eGovernance Through AWS

Amazon Web Services Inc., an Amazon.com company, announced that the government of Telangana (Telangana) is working with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to advance its Cloud Adoption Framework to transform the speed, scale, quality, and efficiency of citizen service delivery for its 40 million residents. The state government is migrating information technology (IT) workloads to the cloud to accelerate its eGovernance plans, deliver faster and more reliable citizen services through its 33 departments and 289 organizations, while achieving high-operational efficiency and reduced IT costs. The Aarogyasri Health Care Trust (Aarogyasri), the Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation (GHMC), and the Telangana State Department of Information Technology, Electronics, and Communications (ITE&C) are the first state organizations to migrate workloads from on premises to AWS. Using the depth and breadth of AWS, including compute, storage, management, and governance capabilities, Telangana empowers its civil servants to transform processes to enhance the delivery of citizen services, such as hospital care and property tax payments—all while reducing compute costs by 33%.

The growing demand for digital services has increased the volume of public service operational data managed by Telangana. Aarogyasri, a state organization facilitating health insurance implementation, ITE&C, the department charged with using IT to achieve effective and efficient governance, sustainable economic development, and inclusive social development, and GHMC outgrew their on-premises data centers. For example, the Aarogyasri Scheme, a free health care program serving approximately 29 million people living below the poverty line in Telangana, experienced quadruple growth in usage year over year for the past decade, and its co-located space in the Telangana State Data Center could not keep pace with the demand and lacked the capacity to support the program’s growth. GHMC, which provides municipal services for Hyderabad’s 6.9 million residents, needed to improve the availability and scalability of its Oracle E-Business Suite enterprise resource planning (ERP) software so that it could efficiently perform operations like payroll and support new applications and citizen services in future. ITE&C, which oversees eOffice—the file management system used by all 33 government districts to complete daily operational tasks—also needed to prevent downtime and reduce its steep ongoing compute costs.

Telangana worked with India-based AWS Partner Dataevolve Solutions (Dataevolve) to migrate all three organizations’ IT workloads to AWS cloud. Dataevolve helped Aarogyasri securely migrate the Aarogyasri Scheme application to AWS, including 47 terabytes (TB) of sensitive private health data and 30 servers, in less than five months from planning to deployment. ITE&C worked with Dataevolve to move the eOffice system and the entire state’s workloads to AWS—nearly 95 TB of operational data and 150 servers— in three months with no downtime or data loss. GHMC also worked with Dataevolve to migrate its ERP software and workloads to AWS in three months. The three organizations now use AWS solutions like Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), a service that provides secure and resizable compute capacity for virtually any workload, to achieve greater availability and deploy only the compute resources they require. These organizations also use AWS Security Hub, a cloud security posture management service that performs security best practice checks, aggregates alerts, and facilitates automated remediation, and Amazon CloudWatch, a monitoring and observability service, to achieve visibility of their AWS resources, applications, and services.

With AWS, the three organizations have the capacity and scalability to serve citizens better with more accessible and reliable services and processes. Using AWS, Aarogyasri experienced improved uptime, helping more than 500 Telangana hospitals to focus on prioritizing patients rather than resolving outages. Aarogyasri also uses AWS to encrypt The Aarogyasri Scheme’s sensitive patient health data at rest and implement an audit trail. The audit trail enables Aarogyasri’s administrators to monitor and record user activity for compliance and identify unauthorized access to confidential data, especially patient health details. With AWS, ITE&C has achieved 100% availability of its eOffice service, giving government agencies uninterrupted access to IT services that help civil servants work more efficiently, facilitating processes like policymaking and communications between agencies. GHMC also uses AWS to improve the availability of its ERP system, ensuring that payments, like employee salaries and vendor purchase orders, are always delivered on time.

“AWS is crucial to implementing Telangana state government’s Cloud Adoption Framework to transform the speed, scale, and quality of citizen service delivery as well as to improve productivity and operational efficiency,” said Jayesh Ranjan, Principal Secretary, Industries & Commerce (I&C) and Information Technology (IT) Departments, Telangana government. “As the demand for eGovernance services grows, we can easily migrate and scale our workloads reliably and securely on AWS to help districts across Telangana respond to citizen needs faster. Looking ahead, the government of Telangana aims to double down on digital transformation, improving the citizen experience by providing faster and more reliable access to services, like property tax payments.”

“Telangana government is using AWS to drive the digitalization of its departments and enable its 33 districts to continue improving the lives of its 40 million citizens,” said Pankaj Gupta, Leader – Public Sector Enterprises and Government, Healthcare, AISPL, AWS India and South Asia. “Cloud services help governments create a multiplier effect, from ensuring business continuity in healthcare, to improving productivity of municipal services. We look forward to helping the rest of Telangana’s departments harness the power of the cloud to deliver critical services, seamlessly connect with citizens, and respond quickly to emerging governance challenges.”