Bahrain is proving that its commitment to innovation and progress are more than just talk by being the first country in the region to adopt a cloud-first policy. Despite having the normal levels of government bureaucracy, the country is pushing forward and putting to shame the many large private companies that are slow to move with the times and accept that the cloud is the future, according to Salman Al-Khalifa (pictured), vice-chief executive officer of Bahrain Information & eGovernment Authority.

“It’s building applications that can help the citizen, not helping vendors,” Al-Khalifa said. “And I think the key thing is we need to focus our attention on building applications that serve the citizens. We don’t want to keep buying hardware, so what the cloud gave us was the ability to innovate without having to go through all those hoops. That is the real benefit to us as a government by moving to the cloud.”

Al-Khalifa spoke with John Furrier (@furrier) and Dave Vellante (@dvellante), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the AWS Public Sector Summit in Washington, D.C. They discussed Bahrain’s transition to the cloud as a country, its relationship with Amazon Web Services Inc. and the new applications the country is already seeing as a result. (* Disclosure below.)

Building for innovation

Bahrain is not just moving to the cloud and expecting all of its employees to catch up on their own. It has set up a training program, and by all accounts, the developers are loving it, according to Al-Khalifa. And the effect is trickling down to area businesses as well.

“With the cloud, that is the ultimate catalyst for any startup,” he said. “If you had an idea, and you wanted to develop it, you used to have to invest a lot of money into infrastructure, security. But with the cloud, with serverless, with all the tools that you’ve got, it’s going to cost you nothing to establish an application.”

The cloud, essentially, enables a startup to compete with already established big businesses, Al-Khalifa pointed out, citing Careem, a transportation network company based in Dubai, that is doing wildly better than expected. And on an even more local level, one citizen built an app for fishermen in the ports to sell fish without having a middleman taking part of the cut — helping both fishermen and consumers.

“Everybody’s building applications,” Al Khalifa said. “Our crown jewel is the citizen, and the people are the innovators. They are going to be our future developers and entrepreneurs. And making them ready for the cloud is going to help us succeed.”

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 Summit. (* Disclosure: Amazon Web Services Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither AWS nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE