T

he swelling generation and build-up of digital data has turned cloud computing into a necessary part of any institution.

Cloud computing, which offers an on-demand virtual database and remote network services delivered through the internet, has been especially useful to fledgling startups that aim to scale up their businesses without having to build their own data network from scratch.

Several foreign cloud-computing providers such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) — a subsidiary of United States-based online marketplace Amazon — have expanded its customer base to also include government institutions.

More than 3,000 government agencies worldwide operate on Amazon’s cloud network, the company’s chief technology officer (CTO), Werner Vogels, said in Jakarta on Thursday.

AWS is now exploring the possibilities of offering its services to state agencies in the Southeast Asian market, including Indonesia, he added.

“From what I’ve seen, most of the government’s local IT [information and technology] infrastructure, including websites, are still 80 percent more expensive than the enterprise cloud network,” Vogels said during an interview.

He added that converting to cloud computing would be more cost-effective as the government’s computational workload would already be handled by remote servers, therefore eliminating the redundancy of maintaining local data network.

“With cloud computing, government agencies would be able to allocate the funds usually spent on IT management to the improvement of public services,” Vogels said.

However, the prospect of storing government data on foreign servers has been met with skepticism from IT experts.

Nonot Harsono, a former commissioner of the Indonesian Telecommunications Regulatory Body (BRTI), said trusting a foreign firm as a keeper of the government’s vital information was risky.

“It’s especially dangerous in light of data privacy issues that have occurred recently,” he told The Jakarta Post, adding that data stored on a foreign cloud network would be at risk of being analyzed by the provider’s big data technology.

If the government were to store its classified information on AWS’ cloud servers, Nonot said, it should pay extra attention to the terms of service offered by the company. Too often, tech blunders happened as a result of the user’s lack of knowledge regarding the fine print of the agreement, he added.

“Still, I believe that the government should pool the most brilliant local IT experts to build a homegrown private data network in the country, rather than rely on a single foreign company.”

In terms of policies, it is unlikely that the government would store its data on any overseas network in the near future as it would contradict prevailing Government Regulation No. 82/2012 on the management of electronic transactions and systems, which obliges providers to keep their data centers in the country.

Another cloud computing provider, TelkomTelstra, a joint venture between state-owned telecommunication company PT Telekomunikasi Indonesia (Telkom) and Australian telecommunication giant Telstra, may serve as a solution to the cloud dilemma as the company has local servers in Serpong, Banten province, and Sentul in Bogor, West Java. It also plans to open additional data centers in Surabaya, East Java early next year.

AWS servers are currently located in North America, South America, Europe, Africa, the Middle East and the Asia Pacific.

“We don’t have any immediate plans to open a data center in Indonesia,” Vogels said.

The company, however, did open a local office in Jakarta earlier this year, which is staffed by system engineers and account managers handling enterprise clients. AWS’ clients in the country include homegrown e-commerce unicorn Tokopedia, as well as online travel and hotel-booking platform Traveloka.

AWS, which was launched in 2006, booked US$ 1.4 million in revenue during the first quarter of this year, or a 49 percent increase year-on-year. The figure accounts for 11 percent of Amazon’s total revenue in the period. (rfa)