While the United States has led the way in adopting the cloud, other developed and developing countries are also starting to embrace the cloud. Much of this growth has come from extensive educational initiatives, including those that Amazon Web Services Inc. is offering throughout the world.

“We actually did an event in the Philippines, and it was a large-scale student event,” Vincent Quah (pictured), regional head of education, research and not for profit, APAC public sector, at AWS said about a recent AWS educational event. “We had … hundreds of students in a single location with probably close to a 100 educators. We took them through a four-day event … of skills and content learning with hands-on experience.”

Quah spoke with John Furrier (@furrier) and Stu Miniman (@stu), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the AWS Public Sector Summit in Washington, D.C. They discussed the ways AWS’ educational services for the cloud are being integrated into community college, as well as reaching across the world. (* Disclosure below.)

Cloud computing specialization degree first of its kind

Amazon Web Services’ cloud educational opportunities, like the Quah described above, are going on across the globe. These events are possible due to the company’s educational programs, such as AWS Educate, which is a free program that institutions can join that comes with access to content from universities across the world and access to AWS cloud credits to use toward AWS services.

“This is really game-changing for students and for the institution,” Quah said. “It’s game-changing because [institutions] have exactly the same access to all the 125-plus technologies AWS provides to enterprises, and now they are in the hands of students.”

Northern Virginia Community College is one institution implementing these resources into a new cloud associates degree, according to Quah. In collaboration with AWS Educate, starting in fall 2018, the college will offer a cloud computing specialization under its Information Systems Technology associate of applied science degree.

“If you look at the World Economic Forum [report] that was published in 2016, mobile internet and cloud computing are the two key technological drivers that’s creating all these change in the industry, and many, many organizations are now investing,” Quah said.

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