Minister of Communications and Information Technology Amr Talaat said that his ministry is keen to develop a digital infrastructure throughout the country and expand cloud computing services as a major enabler for digital transformation. He added in a press release issued by the ministry on Saturday that the Digital Egypt platform has been launched, which includes more than 165 digital government services. Talaat also indicated that the average fixed internet speed in Egypt doubled, becoming the highest in Africa, with an average speed of approximately 45 mbps in October 2022, compared to 40th place on the continent in January 2019, with an average speed of 6.51 mbps. According to the ministry's statement, Egypt also advanced in the classification of the Digital Government Maturity Index for the year 2022, which was recently issued by the World Bank. It was ranked among the group of leading countries in digital government with the classification (A), which is the highest category in the index. This came in the minister's speech during the Amazon Web Services (AWS) conference on cloud computing technologies, the AWS MENA Cloud Roadshow, during which new technologies in cloud computing and their applications were highlighted. In his speech, the minister said that more than 20,000 government buildings have been connected to the optical fibre network as part of the implementation of a project to link all government buildings across the country, which amount to 33,000 buildings to exchange data between them, as the connection of the rest of the government buildings will be completed within the coming year. He also highlighted the implementation of a project to lay optical fibre cables in the villages of the Decent Life initiative to provide internet services to more than 58 million citizens in more than 4,500 villages nationwide, as fibre optic cables have so far been connected to more than 300 villages. Furthermore, Talaat shed light on the strategy of the ministry, which aims to expand the base of specialised skills in technological fields. He added that work is currently underway to increase the number of trainees and the budget allocated for technical training over the past four years to increase the number of trainees in all technical disciplines, with attention to refining their personal skills, which are required to enhance their competitiveness in the local and global labour markets. Additionally, during the activities of the roadshow, the AWS announced the availability of AWS outpost services in Egypt, which serve all government agencies and all public and private business sectors. With AWS outposts, customers use databases and other services locally. They can also access the full suite of services available in the AWS cloud to build, manage, and extend their on-premises applications. Azza Al-Shenawy — General Manager of Egypt and North Africa at Amazon Web Services — said that the company's provision of AWS outpost services in Egypt reflects the expansion efforts that seek to meet the needs of the company's customers to provide this fully managed service from AWS in Egypt. AWS outposts also provide the same AWS infrastructure, services, and tools to any on-premises data centre or data centre shared spaces, enabling an integrated hybrid cloud computing experience for AWS customers in Egypt. AWS outpost services are ideal for business applications that require rapid access to services and on-premises data processing in many industries.
