 brought to you by Amazon Web Services. Hello everyone, welcome back to live coverage here for theCUBE in Bahrain. We're in the Middle East, first time ever, making the trip out here as part of our exclusive coverage of Amazon Web Services, Public Sector Summit. For the first time, we are seeing a region being deployed here in the Middle East in Bahrain and the surrounding area. So, we're here in the middle east, in the middle east, in the middle east, in Bahrain and the surrounding friendly countries. This is a watershed moment for AWS as they put a region, they announced it and it'll be operational in early 2019 in record time. A lot of build up going on. That's going to have a major impact for entrepreneurship, society and overall data. Data is the new oil. This is what's happening. This is theCUBE coverage. I'm John Furrier, your host. Our next guest is Muhammad Altura, who's the Chief Information Technology Sector in Communications with the Authority of Kuwait. He's the CTO. Welcome to theCUBE. Thank you. Thank you for coming on, I really appreciate it. So, tell us about the vision because you guys have a 2035 vision around digital transformation. In the United States, we always talk about data is the new oil. This is an oil-driven country that has created a lot of value and also enabled people through that resource. Now, digital is the new resource with connected society. This is the digital transformation. What's your vision? Well, thank you very much for hosting me and thank you for AWS for making this great summit, really helping people to accomplish their vision and develop economies as well. Well, for Kuwait, we are very much excited about putting the technology in the center of our economy. As you know, now technology is being efficient everywhere. As individuals, we cannot live with our smartphone. As cooperation, we cannot live without a proper IT. And the same thing with economy. You have to deploy IT in your economy and in healthcare, in education, e-commerce, public safety, government. So you make it dynamic and efficient and much less cost to sustain and open a huge potential of growth using that. And of course, in Kuwait, we are thinking of seriously every day to put the technology in the center of economy and also creates interpreneur segment to sustain this type of economy as well. And that growth will definitely help us not only in developing those sectors, but also the demand power of those sectors that's going to manage this growth. So you're the chief in Kuwait for the CITRA, which stands for the Communications Information Technology Regulatory Authority. So essentially, that's all the action, that's all the infrastructure, that's all the communications. This is the foundation for what the future society is going to be built on. Basically, for CITRA, they are a regulator for telecom and IT, and our main bottom line is to deploy those two technologies by regulations in our country to get down to three things, basically. To make people's life easier, to develop and protect our economy, and to support innovation. And to do that, there are so many diversified initiatives that we have to take place, such as interpreneur programs, such as healthcare everywhere, making healthcare goes to people as well, such as education, generation change, and also interpreneur segment growth policies. They all come together and they create the three bottom lines that we're talking about, which is make people's life easy, develop, protect economy, and support innovation. This is the reality now, it's not just aspirational, it's actually reality. Also, being from the first time in the area for us in the CUBE, we observe on the ground here the ground truth, which is a vibrant, robust culture. And some people might not have that. So, take a minute to explain the culture, because with digital, it's not a radical transformation, it's an extension of the culture. How would you describe what's going on in Kuwait culturally, and what are you enabling, and what's the early signals of what is a thing to come? There is a very much focus on ICT in terms of a culture, because in our culture, worldwide we have the highest number of smartphone subscribers, and LTE network subscribers, so we do have a digital society, by DNA right now. In the old days, we used to train people and make awareness, now we don't have to do that. It's part of our DNA. You see small kids are preying around smartphones and doing so many technological things that we never expected, and that actually is extending also to the mid-age, and the senior people, we see that they wanted to make sure they bridge the gap between the young generation and the old generation. So definitely the cultures there, the infrastructures there, our LTE networks today cover the entire geography of Kuwait, including the offshore islands. So no matter where you go to Kuwait, you'll find a high-speed access of the internet. Now we started to do trials on 5G as well. We love trendy technologies. Our entrepreneur programs are going to focus on trendy things, cloud computing, cloud chain, artificial intelligence, and internet of things. These are the main drivers for our economy versus traditional IT. Of course, we still have legacy in country, and we are looking of how we're going to transform that to the trendy technology that's definitely going to be more efficient, more scalable, and much less cost, and opening a trend of economic development in the country as well. This is a reality, and I think you made a point about the LTE and 5G perfectly preparation. Always made a comment about training people. I remember the days, like, here's a terminal, here's the manual, read the manual, learn some IT server. Mobile has changed all that. So that's the reality changing. The question is what's next? As entrepreneurs start to have access and citizens have mobile, you have to really start thinking strategically around how to provide value to citizens, people in your country, whether it's just getting services and communicating to other citizens or with the government, and then entrepreneurs who are creating and building things. You touched a very important point. Technology's supposed to make life people easier because we have some government services that people have to go physically. People have to go online. They always have to follow up themselves. 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 and also make it easier for the foreign investments to come and work in Kuwait market as well. So definitely technology will play a huge role of making people include and engage with the government. And other sectors. One of the exciting things from our world in the United States that live in California, Silicon Valley is you look at the globalization of entrepreneurship, check the mobile penetration, check. And the innovation is not so much the technology anymore. It's business models. It's how money's being deployed and used, it costs the capital. So I got to ask you because now software is eating the world and you have software money and data is the new oil, data is money, this is a very interesting time. So if software is money, how do you view that because now that you have the infrastructure, cryptocurrency, blockchain, these are new opportunities to digitize your supply chain, create a new Vintech environment. What's your vision on this because this is happening really fast? This actually is very important to make your market efficient. And what I mean by that is that you can get things going much easier than the old ways. And definitely we wanted to make sure that everybody is included. I mean, there is no one left behind. Awareness definitely can be done much easier than before. And in order for you to innovate before you have to have a set up of labs, investment. Now you just go to the cloud and find your innovative environment whether you are healthcare, education, biomed, you know, all type of fields. Oil and gas is very important to go with as it is number one industry still. And it's all going to depend on definitely technology. Every sector is being disrupted. Yes. Okay, so talk about your relationship with AWS. Also you have, I think some news you guys have had released with Amazon a Memorandum of Understanding or MOU as they call it. Describe the relationship with Amazon that you guys have. I know it's a very productive one. What is it all about? How do you see it unfolding? MOU was signed last September 4th in Washington, D.C. between Citra CEO and, sorry, Theresa, the VP worldwide for public sector in AWS. And it's focusing on mainly three parts, economic development, entrepreneur development in Kuwait so that we can develop the ICT economy. And of course, the protection of all this which is the cybersecurity. Now with these three main areas that we're working on, definitely healthcare education our priority and creating the right policies as a regulator to make sure that we all going to match the vision of 2035 as well as the, sorry, the new trends of technology, which is IoT, which is the robotics, the artificial intelligence. All of these going to really contribute great for the economy and the relationship between us and AWS. And we're very excited actually to kick off this. We are now, since we just did it three weeks ago, we are developing an execution plan between us and AWS so that we can progress this MOU as quickly as possible. And we have many stakeholders as well. So we already brought some stakeholders here as a kick off with healthcare education. And definitely on the coming days, we will engage more people from Kuwait. Education certainly great, healthcare, you need that. Citizen interfacing with the government, all good. Obviously Kuwait, oil and gas you mentioned, big, important. IoT and cybersecurity are now go hand in hand. Super important, this is very important. This is something that you guys see very big part of instrumenting a lot of the preexisting operations of the government and also the facilities. This is a part of your plan, IoT and security. Talk about the role of cybersecurity in IoT because IoT is a surface area. You have to protect it, it's hard. We already started the trial of 5G. Of course, 5G definitely give you advantage on speed, but 5G without IoT, I don't think it makes a huge difference. So imagine if you have your healthcare system built on IoT, so you can track the patients, track everybody real time. Anything goes wrong, you'll see all the components to come together to make the fix for the patient is much quicker than before. For example, if we talk about some processes in the government that takes some time with blockchain technology and IoT, is definitely you're going to solidify the relationship between all parties and becomes real time relationship. And we're very excited because that would actually make, you know, the economy becomes more vibrant and when it becomes like this, then more money is going to be generated in the GDP. Wireless is critical for IoT you're saying, especially 5G because now you got a blanket of RF, radio frequency powering the devices. Great, love it. Question for you, role of data. Data is now the new way to interact because cloud makes data, you got analytics, you got people who are on mobile that are moving around, healthcare is tapping in. Real time information is super important. You got the 5G high speed wireless overlaying. How do you view the role of data? We're working with AWS on a policy called data classification policy and GDPR, which is data general regulatory policy regulation. And that will help us actually to make sure the data, whatever class it is, it's in the right place. Because some people think that if you put your data in public cloud, then you have some issue with privacy, which is not actually because now you can classify, if you have a public data, then you have a classification, it's everybody's can access it. If you have a private data, the cloud can give you a secure place to store it and make sure nobody gets into anybody's privacy. Making it addressable is really important and making it real time, low latency. Okay, final question for I really appreciate your time. I know you got a hard stop. We're here with the chief of the CITRA in Kuwait, a super big time opportunity for you guys with digital and AWS, but I want you to share to the folks watching that will watching live and on demand, what should they know about what's going on in Kuwait? The culture, the technology, the digital transformation that they might not know about. Share your perspective of what's happening in Kuwait. I would say, I mean now the cloud awareness is being very much obvious among Kuwait people and you see a lot of cloud adoption is happening as we speak. I mean, our organization started about four years ago and we adopted the cloud from day one. Also you think about the things that we need to do more awareness in Kuwait, I think is the IOT and AI, Artificial Intelligence and Blockchain because these are new trends and people still not fully aware of what good things they can do to our economy. Mohamed Altura, thank you for spending the time on your very busy schedule here at this amazing event oversold, really crowded. We're looking forward to being in the region with theCUBE. We're looking forward to following up with you on the cool AI, Blockchain and IOT. We love that area, we love talking about it. Thanks for sharing your insights here. Thank you very much. I'm John Furrier here with theCUBE. You can reach me on Twitter at Furrier, also online and everywhere, just search my name and if you want to reach out, send me some messages. Happy to talk about it. Cube coverage here in Bahrain for theCUBE's new ground we're covering in the Middle East. All the innovations happening here right around AWS's new regions here in the Middle East. Stay with us after this short break.