Category: Best Practices

State and local governments (SLGs) are constantly looking for ways to improve the lives and well-being of their constituents. They strive for increased efficiencies in delivering existing government services or potential new services such as those related to assistance with food, health, education, affordable housing, weatherization, and more. Enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions, along with ancillary business systems that support performance-based budgeting, play a key role in providing data insights. The balancing act between tight budgets and enablement of government services is enabled by fiscal health, sound policies, and data insights. ERP systems deployed on the cloud can help with the capabilities and technology tools that governments need to derive efficiencies with existing services and deploy new services.

Innovators in the transportation sector can seek additional sources of funding to help advance projects to improve safety, efficiency, system performance, and infrastructure. The US Department of Transportation (USDOT) offers state and local government funding opportunities through discretionary grant programs that encourage transportation agencies to think big. Several AWS customers, including the Contra Costa Transportation Authority and the Washington Department of Transportation (WSDOT), successfully won these highly competitive USDOT grants. Learn from the collaborators on these projects, including Haile, Mark Haselkorn, director of the University of Washington’s Center for Collaborative Systems for Safety, Security, and Regional Resilience (CoSSaR), and Jimmy Kim, head of business development for smart communities, transportation, and mobility at Verizon, as they share their suggestions for crafting a successful application.

What if we were to democratize access to data and compute so that anyone, anywhere in the world could contribute to climate science? The Amazon Sustainability Data Initiative (ASDI) seeks to accelerate sustainability research and innovation by minimizing the cost and time required to acquire and analyze large sustainability datasets. ASDI supports innovators and researchers with the data, tools, and technical expertise they need to advance sustainability initiatives. ASDI is committed to making climate-relevant data easier to access and analyze. ASDI’s growing data catalog comprises petabytes of open data.

Increasingly, central banks want to answer practical questions and make the technology choices involved to deliver a central bank digital currency (CBDC). They need a solution that delivers on their missions and meets the performance criteria required to support a stable monetary and financial system. To help organizations understand available technology options and see how cloud services can enable optimal solution designs, AWS authored a two-part whitepaper. Here are some of the highlights.

Internal Revenue Service Publication 1075 (IRS 1075) provides guidance for US government agencies, agents, and contractors that access Federal Tax Information (FTI), to make sure they use policies, practices, controls, and safeguards to protect FTI confidentiality and integrity of FTI throughout its lifecycle. Safeguarding FTI is critical to agencies that receive, process, store or transmit FTI. AWS and AWS Partner programs enable agencies to protect FTI and the confidential relationship between the taxpayer and the IRS.

The US CDC convened the National Forum on COVID-19 Vaccine to share and discuss best practices to help advance the goals of the National Strategy for the COVID-19 Response and Pandemic Preparedness. The forum brought representatives together from across the US government involved in the response to COVID-19. AWS participated in the forum as a panelist for “Day 2 Town Hall: Using Technology to Manage COVID-19 Vaccination.” AWS has worked closely with many states and jurisdictions looking to quickly design, launch, and mobilize their vaccination administration plans using cloud technology. Learn some of the best practices shared at the forum on how the cloud can help with vaccine administration.

The AWS Cloud gives genomics researchers access to a wide variety of instance types and chip architectures and this elasticity allows us to rethink genomics workflows when running workloads in the cloud. Given the increased performance of the Graviton2 instances, we wanted to explore if they can be used for cost-effective and performant genomics workloads. Read on to learn about our generalized approach for determining the most effective instance type for running genomics workloads in the cloud.

Looking at information security as an enabler for change, not a blocker, was the mind shift that contributed to digital transformation in UK government. The UK modernization of data classification concepts and processes enabled more responsive public services, as well as massive savings (£1.7bn in 2014 alone). From 2012 through 2015, the authors of this blog worked together in the Cabinet Office in the UK to reform a decades-old information security policy. This effort helped unlock widespread cloud adoption in the UK public sector and the advantages that come with it.

At AWS, we want to help organizations modernize IT infrastructure and create scalable mechanisms to manage growing datasets, take advantage of emerging technologies like machine learning, improve citizen services, and innovate for the long-term. Buying cloud computing services requires different skills than buying traditional IT, particularly given cloud’s ability to adjust technology resources dynamically and how this may impact contract solicitations and, more broadly, acquisition strategies. Are you ready to move to the cloud but need some guidance on where to start? Here are some best practices for government customers and procurement teams looking to build a culture of innovation and begin their cloud acquisition journey.

Do you ever get overwhelmed by the thought of preparing and teaching your students online? It’s a challenging task at best but remember to keep it simple. Leveraging cloud technology can help make teaching and learning remotely more manageable for our students, our community, and us. Picking the right tools in the AWS Cloud can help you with course development. Let’s explore a research-based method called technological pedagogical and content knowledge (or TPACK) that helps plan learning experiences.