Category: Best Practices

When considering a move to the cloud, many organizations struggle with a common problem: the migration bubble. This bubble is formed when organizations are covering expenses for their current on-premises infrastructure while incurring new costs for a cloud migration. But what if you could use that legacy hardware to your advantage? These cost-savings strategies can help free up budget resources and accelerate your journey to the cloud.

In June 2020, the AWS Public Sector Blog covered next-generation tolling, how researchers can use the cloud right now, the AWS Public Sector Summit Online, and more. For more blog highlights from this month, you can also check out The Brief.

State governments are currently experiencing a spike in the number of applications for social benefit programs. These programs serve millions of people every year to support healthcare and to help keep them out of poverty. To address the surge, agencies are looking at cloud-based services including artificial intelligence (AI), conversational bots, and call centers to improve the customer experience as well as workforce productivity, provide more visibility for agency leadership into program performance, and help reduce fraud, waste, and abuse.

Research is done differently in the cloud than in an on-premises lab. Research labs looking to move computational research to the cloud should start with their workflows. There are common themes across computational research workflows that researchers should consider as they begin to move their research workflows to AWS.

Students from two secondary schools on opposite sides of the world used AWS DeepRacer to learn about machine learning (ML). Using AWS DeepRacer, students from a school in Vancouver, Canada and Instanbul, Turkey learned how to design, train, and deploy a model car using ML. These students competed on virtual racetracks against each other—all within the AWS Management Console.

Later this year, the Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification (CMMC) accreditation framework will take effect, impacting U.S. DoD contractors, supply chain, solution providers, and systems integrators. The DoD estimates that more than 300,000 organizations will require certification. In addition, other U.S. federal agencies and international organizations may adopt a similar framework to protect their intellectual property (IP). No matter the size of your organization, cloud-based services can help you meet the requirements of CMMC.

The COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated that public sector organizations need modern infrastructure, capabilities and controls to overcome the disruption caused by global health outbreaks. Organizations that embraced cloud services proved more responsive. They were able to continue operating remotely and serving their customers and citizens, demonstrating agility, scalability, and speed. In How Governments Can Build Resilience in a New Normal: Emerging Practices from Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, a new policy paper from the AWS Institute, we outline how organizations can use the cloud to recover from the disruption that the virus brought, as well as become more resilient for future challenges.

At Amazon, we are committed to providing immediate relief and response to global communities impacted by natural disasters. The Amazon Web Services (AWS) Disaster Response team plays an important role in this response, and the team has supported customers worldwide in the wake of hurricanes, fires, earthquakes, and disease outbreaks including COVID-19. We help by bringing our operational and logistics expertise, as well as cloud technology to support our customers and our communities when and where they need it most, working closely with organizations like the American Red Cross.

In May 2020, the AWS Public Sector Blog covered stories on the AWS Public Sector Summit Online 2020, chatbots and call centers, and open source solutions. Check out some of the top stories from the blog below. For more blog highlights from this month, you can also check out The Brief, hosted this month by Mike Colson.

K12 educational organizations are modernizing their institutions by providing secure anywhere, anytime access to learning for students. Whether a district or school is a cloud veteran or forging new ground, the cloud is helping break down barriers to opportunity, like the ability to access applications through any device. By using the cloud, many K12 institutions—including schools, districts, educational service agencies, and state education agencies—are having breakthroughs in educational models and student engagement.