Cloud transformation is a challenge for any organization. Migration missteps are common, and there is no one-size-fits-all solution. Cloud migration when the client is a centuries-old government institution is an especially tricky path to navigate.

At 165 years old, the Central Public Works Department of India is successfully leading the country’s government services into the digital era. The transformation is taking place under the guidance of Tech Mahindra Inc. with support from technology partners Amazon Web Services Inc. and SAP SE.

“All of our system is going to be automatic,” said Satyendra Gupta (pictured, right), director of enterprise resource planning at the CWPD. “By the click of the button, we will be able to get all the inputs, all the reports with what is going on across the country.”

Gupta and Gautam Chatterjee (pictured, left), sales leader of the India public sector at Tech Mahindra Ltd., spoke with Stu Miniman, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, about the AWS Public Sector 2020 Partner Awards Program. They discussed Tech Mahindra’s award-winning cloud-migration strategy for the Indian government’s Public Works department. (* Disclosure below.)

A lighthouse project for government services

Creating the model for a successful migration meant research, planning and coordination between Chatterjee’s team at Tech Mahindra, CPWD and other technology partners. “We understood the challenges. We understood the number of users, number of iterations, number of redundancies, the kind of high availability they will require in times of the business difficulty of the applications,” Chatterjee said.

SAP software-as-a-service was brought in for HANA implementation, while compute and storage is deployed from the AWS cloud. And all third-party tools for performance, testing, management and monitoring are provided as platform as a service by AWS, Chatterjee explained.

“AWS, Tech Mahindra, and SAP, all three of us together arrived at a complete solutions architecture and the optimization of the whole solution,” he said. “[The] overall impact comes to CPWD as the customer, [delivering] the ultimate results and the business output they deserve.”

The successful implementation of the automated cloud system for the Central Public Works department will have long-term reach across the entire country, according to Gupta, who described the project as “the lighthouse up ahead.” The scalability and repeatability of the cloud-based system will “create and open a window” for other departments to adopt the same, or similar, ERP systems and automate their workflows, he explained.

Chatterjee unequivocally believes that no government organization should attempt cloud migration without the kind of expert support Tech Mahindra and its partners are providing CPWD. “To manage such a huge, mammoth task of the entire infrastructure, applications, services, troubleshooting, 24 by 7, everything … that’s not their business,” he stated. “Their business is to run the country, their business to run the organization, their business to grow the country’s different ideas.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the AWS Public Sector 2020 Partner Awards Program. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the AWS Public Sector 2020 Partner Awards Program. Neither AWS, the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE