Category: Federal

As government services around the world become increasingly digitalized, digital ID systems — many running on the cloud — are a critical part of these digital transformations. In this post, we dive deep into how these digital ID systems are strategically designed around a common vision, and how the cloud can help.

The Canadian Centre for Cyber Security (CCCS) added more AWS services to its assessment of the AWS Canada (Central) Region, bringing the total number of assessed AWS services to 120. This provides Canadian public sector customers additional confidence that AWS Cloud services meet the Government of Canada’s security control requirements. Using these services in conjunction with the deployment of the open source AWS Secure Environment Accelerator (ASEA) solution reduces cloud service configuration time from months to days.

Since 2003, the US federal government has made approximately $1.7 trillion in improper payments, with an estimated $206 billion made in FY 2020 alone. Improper payments are now anticipated to increase proportionally to new levels of federal spending. How can agencies fight improper payments at this scale? And what tools can agencies use to address fraud, erroneous data submission and other causes of this problem? Agencies can use AWS to solve the multi-sided issues of payment integrity.

As governments around the world digitize services, individuals are required not only to prove their identities, but to do so on digital channels. This is a challenge not only for people without legal ID, but also for individuals with ID documents that are hard to use digitally. Cloud-based digital ID systems can be a solution to this challenge. Plus, digital ID creates a robust scope of benefits — and cloud-based approaches to implementing these systems provide the speed, scale, and security needed for digital ID to succeed.

The second annual AWS DeepRacer Army-Navy Competition brings teams together to train a robotic vehicle to discover whose car can autonomously navigate a track with the fastest time, using artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics. The competition is for anyone affiliated with the Army or Navy, no matter their experience with AI, machine learning, or robotics. Novices can get started with machine learning quickly with hands-on tutorials. The second annual competition will happen on December 11 2021, prior to the Army-Navy football game. Registration is now open.

Government agencies are moving to speed up service delivery, but agencies need to obtain an Authority to Operate (ATO) that demonstrates security compliance prior to implementation, which can take a significant amount of time and can prove to be a challenge in meeting tight deadlines. AWS Partner Booz Allen Hamilton (Booz Allen) uses a platform as a service model on Amazon Web Services (AWS) to enable their customers to rapidly build, test, scan, and deploy their applications — accelerating releases in the federal government from months to days.

China will launch its digital currency February 2022, and the UK and Eurozone have joined the movement for central bank digital currencies (CBDC), but it is the smaller, emerging economies that are leading the charge and have much to gain, experts have predicted. In a recent Global Government Forum and AWS Institute panel discussion, financial technology (FinTech) specialists noted it is the Bahamas and Cambodia who are the CBDC pioneers. The Bank for International Settlements said 86% of central banks are experimenting with CBDCs and 10% are close to implementing them, while banks representing 20% of the global population will launch a digital currency within three years.

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.