Govt aspires 5x growth in digital economy targeting USD 15 Bn by 2030

The government aims for a multi-cloud hybrid system, integrating public and resident cloud infrastructures to drive the digital economy, Dr. Hans Wijayasuriya, Chief Advisor to the President on Digital Economy told the Grounded Sovereign Cloud Symposium 2026 held in Colombo on June 17.

Sri Lanka aspires a 5x growth in its digital economy from around USD 3 to 4 billion today to USD 15 billion by 2030. More importantly, it means the digital economic component of the economy, which is 3 to 4 percent today, will increase to around 12 percent by 2030, he said.

Dr Wijayasuruya said although Sri Lanka has been ahead of the region and wider APAC community in certain areas of digital transformation, the country faced challenges in system interoperability. Introducing horizontal layers can enhance data sharing, minimize building from scratch and expedite execution in the digital economy, aided by improving infrastructure and cloud services.

He said the Personal Data Protection Act which has come into effect and the Data Protection Authority which is the regulatory authority around has been very progressive in leaving as much room as possible for decisions to be made by sector regulators all the way down to controllers themselves, controllers of data to take the call on cross-border and or quasi-cross-border or sovereign versus resident formulations in processing data.

“So it’s up to the professional community to decide what data must be strictly resident or air-gapped versus what data can safely be processed in a sovereign environment and indeed what data can be released into the public cloud because we all know that there is paradox that when you look at this continuum on one hand from residency to sovereignty to direction of continuum, the other direction of continuum is on cyber security, on innovation, on cost and on the applicability. The flow will be the other way around because there’s no way that a single country, especially a small nation, can invest in those infrastructures to the extent that global players can,” he said.

Dr Wijayasuriya said keeping up with the latest threat environments globally is something the country needs to take into account when finding the right place for the right data along this continuum and in that sense an AWS outpost sits in a very powerful position on this continuum because it’s in a way the best of all. It brings together those global capabilities, global scale and a sovereign capability and environment on the other.

He said Sri Lanka can lead the digital economy with hybrid cloud capabilities, fostering innovation, talent and infrastructure for a robust multi-cloud environment.

Source: Daily News