Category: State or Local Government

Even in uncertain times, election officials and political stakeholders are committed to serving a dynamic electorate in a secure, scalable, and cost-effective way. Cloud-based technologies from Amazon Web Services (AWS) and the AWS Partner Network (APN) can help elections administrators, campaigns, and civic engagement organizations with access to information, security and scalability, and absentee voting workflow solutions.

Technology and the cloud can help address some of the world’s most pressing and immediate challenges, like battling COVID-19 and improving cities. At Amazon Web Services (AWS), we encourage innovation through technology in our AWS Cloud Innovation Centers (CICs). CICs are long-term, strategic collaborations with public sector organizations interested in solving societal problems through digital solutions while providing students a platform to learn by doing. Check out a few of the challenges CICs around the world have worked on so far this year.

In the United States, unemployment insurance claims are rising, with the current insured unemployment rate at 15.7%—the highest since the end of World War II. Many states are struggling with the volume of applications, causing legacy back-office systems to crash. Workforce West Va. identified three actions they could take to improve constituent services; many of these actions were enabled by the cloud.

City and state government leaders are on the front line fighting COVID-19. Government agencies need to reach their constituents at a moment’s notice to communicate everything from the location of disease hot spots, calls for volunteers, providing life-saving guidelines, and keeping the public informed about the current state of affairs. They need to be able to reach citizens virtually or through electronic methods, since meeting in person isn’t an option. In this blog, you learn how to create an Amazon Connect instance, set it up in over a dozen languages, and send messages to millions of people in a short period of time.

Chatbots and modern call centers provide governments with an efficient way to connect with citizens during critical times. Governments, health systems, and educational institutions are responsible for communicating and maintaining information portals regarding public safety, health and human services, emergency services, social services, and more. Now more than ever, communities are turning to their public sector organizations for up-to-date information. Read on to learn from organizations across industries and how they have scaled their services to meet increased demand.

State government labor and workforce development agencies are wrestling with an unprecedented surge in demand for services. In one week, 6.6 million Americans filed for initial unemployment insurance (UI) claims, nearly double the previous week. Many states are straining to meet this increase for demand in services. The cloud can help labor and agencies quickly scale and shift to meet constituent needs.

In March, the Fix This podcast focused on how the cloud is used to help improve voter engagement and elections processes and how machine learning helps to power sustainable trucking.

Are you a U.S. government employee or contractor who is interested in learning about cloud computing? AWS is now offering the AWS Cloud Practitioner Essentials Day and AWS Technical Essentials Day courses virtually to government workers interested in learning about the cloud. These instructor-led courses will be offered online starting Monday, March 23.

Every hour of every day, our nation’s first responders and 9-1-1 personnel rely on a patchwork of telecommunications and public safety applications to protect their residents and save lives. Whether it’s a 9-1-1 answering point, a computer aided dispatch (CAD) system, a records management (RMS) system, or a mobile communications network, emergency response systems must be available and operational at all times. The accepted availability standard for emergency response systems is 99.999% or “five nines” – or about five minutes and 15 seconds of downtime per year.

Health and human services (HHS) agencies are in the midst of dramatic change, with ever-growing transaction volumes and increasing demand for new services and visibility into data. Looking for new ways to manage constituent demands, the agencies are turning to the cloud to run mission-critical applications that administer healthcare and social benefits programs for millions of beneficiaries, resulting improved system agility, security, and costs.