Bahrain may be a small country, but it is positioned to become a digital country by 2035, and it’s leaders are looking to the future where its citizens will have unique opportunities with technologies surrounding a cloud-first policy. The country is accomplishing this through a groundbreaking partnership with Amazon Web Services Inc.

“Our leaders said, ‘We are a bit slow. We need to [speed] things up,'” said Mohammed Ali Al Qaed (pictured), chief executive officer of the Information & eGovernment Authority (iGA) in Bahrain. “So then we looked into Amazon and the cloud, how it could help us. This is why we looked into the cloud, what it can bring to the country — the agility, the time to market. And when we put the strategy forward, it was a comprehensive one.”

Al Qaed spoke with John Furrier (@furrier), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the AWS Summit event in Bahrain. They discussed Bahrain’s strategy to embrace the cloud and the digital transformation of the country. (* Disclosure below.)

Education expedites progression

The cloud-first decision was made in 2017, according to Al Qaed, because the government knew the cloud was the only option to bring about a digital transformation. Once they made the decision, they’ve been fast-acting. “This is why, in a year’s time, we managed to migrate huge workloads to the cloud,” Al Qaed said.

Time to market is a huge issue, and the country — and organizations like iGA — are responding like a startup. The Amazon region is going up in record time, and the country is already experimenting with 5G, Al Qaed explained. Microservices in the cloud are the glue to help push this forward. And Bahrain is dedicated to educating its people on these technological advancements.

“We looked into the training strategy, all the portfolio training, making sure that our Bahrainees have the ability to develop, to operate databases and all aspects, even the planning of it,” Al Qaed stated.

Hundreds of government employees are being trained, and they have started training kids to code in elementary school. “We want to give Bahrainians a choice for employment,” Al Qaed concluded. “If that’s the future, we have to make them ready for the future.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the AWS Summit Bahrain event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for AWS Summit Bahrain 2018. Neither Amazon Web Services Inc. and the Bahrain Economic Development Board, the event sponsors, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE