On Tuesday, November 29, at the AWS re:Invent 2022 in Las Vegas, the Ukraine Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Digital Transformation Mykahilo Federov and AWS Director of Digital Government Transformation Liam Maxwell signed a Memorandum of Understanding to continue their cooperation.
On February 24, 2022, the day of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, a scheduled meeting between AWS’s public sector team met with members of the Ukraine government turned into a discussion over how to protect the country’s critical data. This included the delivery of AWS Snowball devices – compute and storage devices – into Ukraine. In 48 hours, the devices arrived to become the foundation of safeguarding the country’s data. Among the swaths of data going into the cloud was those of PrivatBank, Ukraine’s largest private bank, which serves 40% of the country’s population. As the war rages on, AWS continues to add over 10 petabytes of essential data already migrated from 27 Ukrainian ministries, 18 Ukrainian universities, the largest remote learning K–12 school (serving hundreds of thousands of displaced children), and dozens of other private sector companies. Onstage, Maxwell also mentioned several other initiatives launched by AWS to help Ukraine, including the IT Skills FU, which offers IT courses. “We are very proud to stand with the people of Ukraine,” Maxwell stressed.
On his part, Federov credited AWS with saving the Ukraine government and economy. AWS, he added, has helped Ukraine to make a first step in winning the war by migrating the country’s critical data to the cloud. “For nine months, Ukraine has been fighting for freedom and democratic choice,” Federov said. “In many ways, this is a war of technologists. Me and my team believe in big data, analytics, and constant improvement, but as technologists in Ukraine, we are using technology (on the) side of light.”
Answering questions from the audience, Federov also mentioned that they are facing a cyberwar, with daily attacks on their critical infrastructure, which they have successfully fended. On the state of technological innovation in Ukraine, Maxwell referred to the smartphone app “Diia,” which essentially has digitalised the government’s bureaucratic services, and said that AWS would continue to support the Ministry in safeguarding the continuity of the application. Federov added that AWS helped backup the app on the cloud, which has been an immense help due to the several blackouts, which he highlighted as one of the biggest challenges they face. “We want to build the world’s most convenient state in terms of public services,” he said, adding in jest that the audience, and AWS, are welcome to send any services his way.
GOLD magazine is in the US to attend the event, and was there to see the statements. Look out for more about AWS re:Invent 2022 in the upcoming edition of GOLD magazine and on this portal.
