Estonian government collaborates with Amazon

The Estonian economy ministry is cooperating with the company Amazon Web Services in the development of a cloud-based solution that would enable countries around the world to effectively protect their digital assets and public digital services during crises.

According to minister of entrepreneurship and IT, Kristjan Järvan, the war in Ukraine has shown that digital continuity is one of the cornerstones of national security when crises break out.

“Estonia leads the public sector digitisation innovation in the world. The opportunity to cooperate with AWS in creating a solution that supports the digital continuity of countries even in the most difficult moments confirms that Estonia is a reliable and valued partner on the topic of digital transition,” Järvan said.

According to the ministry, the continuity of the digital state and the development of crisis resilience are a priority for Estonia and the country is already backing up nationally important data collections in a data embassy located in Luxembourg.

“The Estonian digital state is complex and multi-layered. With the aim of ensuring readiness for even the most critical scenarios, it is important to combine different solutions into one strong whole. Cloud-based solutions play an important role in this,” Järvan added.

Kristjan Järvan, Estonia's minister of entrepreneurship and IT. Photo from Järvan's Facebook.
Kristjan Järvan, Estonia’s minister of entrepreneurship and IT. Photo from Järvan’s Facebook.

Mitigating risks amid growing geopolitical uncertainty

The minister pointed out that people expect public digital services to always be available.

“The state’s digital assets must be safely protected in the event of a crisis in order to maintain the usual way of life as much as possible. A large part of critical information is already online today and disruptions in its operation have a broad-based impact on the entire society. Countries must think more and more about securing their own cyber rear,” Järvan said.

He noted that governments around the world are actively looking for ways to mitigate risks, fueled by growing geopolitical uncertainty.

“Be it the energy crisis, the rapid growth of cyber attacks or instead the weaknesses of the infrastructure – the discussions have become more intense. They say that you learn best by teaching others and cooperation with AWS has also helped us notice the areas that need help to catch up. So, the benefits are mutual,” he added.

He added that, in addition to AWS, Estonia is engaged in broad-based cooperation with several other global technology companies with whom there is constant communication to ensure the development of Estonia’s digital state and to increase crisis resilience.

Amazon Web Services, Inc. is a subsidiary of Amazon, one of the “big five” American tech companies, alongside Alphabet (Google), Apple, Meta (Facebook), and Microsoft.

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