The BOC is reaping a range of rewards from its decision to use AWS for its AMS. “Had we selected a physical infrastructure rather than AWS, we would have had to purchase and maintain servers in 48 locations throughout the Philippines,” says Dr. Reyes. “That would have cost us hundreds of millions of pesos and does not take into account the cost of operating systems, associated storage, and networking equipment.”

The BOC started developing an Advanced Manifest System (AMS) in March 2016, and completed the production deployment of the application by June 2016. The BOC can now focus its technology resources and personnel on developing and delivering its AMS on AWS. The AMS system allows brokers, government agency employees, and others to review and assess inbound goods 24 hours after their departure from the port of origin, streamlining clearance processes before goods arrive in the Philippines. By digitizing customs processes and enabling payments and preclearances up to 35 days before import cargo arrives at a port, the new systems running on AWS will help the BOC reduce the incidence of corruption. The AMS system will also enable the BOC to, for the first time, provide other authorized government agencies to view its systems. This transparency will help equip law enforcement and other regulatory agencies with near real-time access to information about all inbound cargo.

The BOC compared physical infrastructure and cloud costs through a project to rehabilitate its aging internal data center. The BOC spent about 200 million pesos ($US4.17 million) on 64 cores’ worth of production capacity, whereas its AWS infrastructure provides at least 128 cores’ capacity for less than one-tenth the cost. “In a physical data center, I would need to make sure I had people supporting and monitoring that infrastructure 24/7, and would have to plan to refresh the technology every three years in accordance with government requirements. Now, AWS takes care of all that,” says Dr. Reyes.

BOC developed and delivered its AMS into production in just three months, validating its ability to comply with CMTA obligations and paving the way for other government departments and agencies to adopt AWS Cloud services.