Amazon Web Services Inc. continues to expand outside of the U.S. On September 4, 2018, it signed a memorandum of understanding with the country of Kuwait to help spur the country’s vision of being a digital country by 2035. The MOU was signed in Washington, D.C., between Kuwait’s Communication and Information Technology Regulatory Authority and Teresa Carlson, vice president of the worldwide public sector at AWS.

“For Kuwait, we are very much excited about putting the technology in the center of our economy,” said Mohammad Altura (pictured), executive board member of Kuwait’s Communication and Information Technology Regulatory Authority. “We are thinking … every day to put the technology at the center of economy.”

Altura spoke with John Furrier (@furrier), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the AWS Summit event in Bahrain. They discussed Kuwaits MOU with AWS and the future vision for Kuwait as it becomes a digital country. (* Disclosure below.)

How AWS will make life easier

As the Kuwait government casts a vision for the future, they are focusing on three main areas, according to Altura: economic development, entrepreneur development, and cybersecurity. “Our main bottom line is to deploy those technologies … to make people’s life easier, to develop and protect our economy, and to support innovation,” he said.

To do this, there are many diversified initiatives in Kuwait, such as entrepreneur and healthcare programs. “We have some government services that people have to go to physically or have to go online where they always have to follow up themselves,” Altura described. “Now we want to make technology to push things to people — to make it easier for them to interact with government, with healthcare, with commerce. That’s very important. To make an easy environment for people to implement their vision.”

This transition is already happening because the people of Kuwait have become digitally savvy, from the young to the old, Altura pointed out. “It’s part of our DNA. You see small kids playing around smartphones and doing so many … technological … things that we never expected,” he stated.

However, the people of Kuwait, while embracing ideas like cloud computing, have much to learn about concepts like the internet of things, artificial intelligence, and blockchain. “These are new trends and people are still … not fully aware of what good things they can do to our economy,” Altura concluded.

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