The Minister of Communications and Information Technology Amr Talaat has delivered a keynote speech at Amazon Web Services (AWS) MENA Cloud Roadshow, which highlights cloud computing technologies and software.
The Conference was attended by the Deputy ICT Minister for Administrative Development, Digital Transformation and Automation Khaled El Attar, the Assistant ICT Minister for Global Information Infrastructure (GII) Mohamed Nasr Eldin, and several officials from the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology (MCIT) and AWS.
The ICT Minister emphasized that MCIT is developing the digital infrastructure nationwide and expanding cloud computing services as a key enabler for digital transformation. He explained that the Digital Egypt platform, which currently includes over 165 digital government services, has been launched.
The ICT Minister pointed out that Egypt’s fixed broadband Internet speed has increased to become at the forefront of African countries with an average speed of nearly 45 Mbps in October 2022, compared to the 40th in January 2019 with an average speed of 6.51 Mbps, according to Ookla's Speedtest Global Index. He revealed that Egypt moved up on the World Bank’s 2022 GovTech Maturity Index (GTMI). Scoring high in the digital government indicator, Egypt came among the countries of Group A, the highest category of GTMI.
In his remarks, Talaat indicated that over 20,000 state buildings have been connected to a fiber-optic network as part of the implementation of the project for connecting the 32,000 government buildings nationwide to this network to interchangeably exchange data. He added that the other state buildings will be connected during the next year.
Furthermore, the project for installing fiber optic cables in the villages targeted within the Decent Life initiative has been implemented to provide Internet services to 58+ million citizens in over 4,500 villages nationwide. So far, more than 300 villages have been connected through the cables.
The ICT Minister pointed to MCIT strategy to expand the technological talent pool. The number of trainees as well as the budget for technical training have been increased over the past four years to increase the number of trainees in all technical disciplines, honing their soft skills required to enhance their competitiveness in the local and global labor markets.
Talaat commended AWS expansion in Egypt to harness the ICT sector’s ability to attract leading global companies.
During MENA Cloud Roadshow, AWS announced the provision of AWS Outposts in Egypt, which serve all government agencies and the public and private sectors.
Using AWS Outposts, customers can compute and store information and use databases and other on-premises services. They can also access all services available in the AWS cloud to establish, manage and expand on-premises software.
The Head of Egypt at AWS Azza El-Shinnawy declared that AWS announcement of the general provision of AWS Outposts has culminated the tireless efforts made to fulfill AWS customers’ needs to provide AWS fully managed service in Egypt. AWS Outposts also provide the same AWS infrastructure, services, and tools to any on-premises data center or common spaces of data centers, enabling an integrated hybrid cloud computing experience for AWS customers in Egypt, she added. AWS Outposts are ideal for business software that require immediate access to services and on-premises data processing in many sectors.
