The agreement formalises Amazon Web Services' earlier pledge to give computer cloud training to 100,000 people. Photo: 123RF
The web services division of the $1.6-trillion Amazon group has signed a cooperation deal with the New Zealand government.
The US tech giant is building large data centres here and has been courting senior ministers for months.
The new Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) contains echoes of what Amazon Web Services (AWS) sought in correspondence with the government over the past two years, as [https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/political/481441/what-amazon-wanted-from-new-zealand-s-prime-minister
revealed in Official Information Act responses to RNZ].
This includes how AWS will work with the government to increase the public service's uptake of cloud services.
"The MoU provides a foundation for long-term collaboration between AWS and the New Zealand government in areas of cloud adoption, innovation, advanced digital skills, sustainability, and cyber security," AWS said on Thursday.
The agreement formalises AWS's earlier pledge to give computer cloud training to 100,000 people.
It would do this using 600 free online courses, it said.
On cybersecurity, it was working with the government chief information security officer to develop resources for agencies "to securely adopt AWS cloud technology".
Competition is hot for government cloud-computing contracts among multinational tech companies, including Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and other builders of local data centres, such as Datagrid and CDC.
Amazon has an edge in a deal done last July with the Department of Internal Affairs, which allows government agencies to buy cloud services direct from AWS under standard terms.
This also covered councils, universities, tertiary institutions, and schools, AWS said.
For several years, the government has had a "cloud-first" policy which guides where masses of data is held and processed - a lot of it currently in Australia.
A lot of public money has been spent on consultants that specialise in "migrating" public services to cloud computing.
The new Amazon MoU also has a "green" tint, saying it would cooperate with the government on finding ways to invest in renewable energy and "water initiatives". Data centres typically use a lot of electricity and a lot of water to cool the servers.
Little analysis has been made available about the job benefits for New Zealanders of the rush to build so-called "hyper-scale" data centres, that host banks of servers.
Putting them in locally allows the likes of AWS to turn around the data faster, which is especially useful for video streaming and gaming.
AWS, which directly employs just 150 people locally, but talks up how it enables other companies to create jobs, said a focus of the MoU was developing skills to meet future workforce needs, alongside "its investments in local infrastructure".
Adding cloud-computing qualifications to the NCEA (National Certificate of Educational Achievement) was an option.
"We have great hopes for our country's digital future," its country manager for the public sector, Tim Dacombe-Bird, said in a statement.
Amazon Web Services New Zealand is wholly owned in the US.
