For Public Sector Customers: 10 New Products Launched at AWS re:Invent

Our curated list of the new services for public sector customers to use this year

At the 2018 AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas, AWS made many new product announcements that could transform government, education, and nonprofit missions and operations. Below is our curated list of the top ten takeaways from re:Invent 2018 for you to try this year:

1. Optimize Satellite Data Processing: Easily control satellites and ingest imagery data with our fully managed service – AWS Ground Station. Now you don’t have to build your own ground stations, networks and antennas, or obtain long-term leases with ground station providers, often in multiple countries, to provide enough opportunities to contact satellites as they orbit the globe. AWS Ground Station offers a network of 12 antenna ground stations in AWS Regions around the world, where customers can download, process, store, analyze, and act upon satellite data more quicklt with substantial cost savings. Learn more.
2. Quickly Build and Deploy Data Lakes: AWS Lake Formation lets you build a secure data lake in days, instead of months. A data lake is a centralized and secured repository that stores all of your data, both in its original form and prepared for analysis, so you can break down data silos and combine different types of analytics to gain insights. However, setting up and managing a conventional data lake often involves a lot of manual and time-consuming tasks. Creating a data lake with AWS Lake Formation is as simple as defining where your data resides and what data access and security policies you want to apply. AWS Lake Formation then collects and catalogs data from databases and object storage, moves the data into your new Amazon S3 data lake, cleans and classifies data using machine learning algorithms, and secures access to your sensitive data. Learn more.
3. Simplify Data Security Management: AWS Control Tower is the easiest way to set up and govern a secure, compliant multi-account AWS cloud environment. AWS Control Tower creates an automated landing zone for the set up and governance of your accounts. Learn more. Then, AWS Security Hub lets you centrally view and manage security alerts and automate compliance checks across an AWS environment, so you have full control and visibility. Get started with AWS Security Hub in the Management Console and once enabled, AWS Security Hub will begin aggregating and prioritizing findings. Learn more.
4. Create a Consistent Hybrid Cloud Experience: AWS Outposts lets you run AWS infrastructure and services on-premises to deliver a truly consistent hybrid experience, so you can support workloads that need to remain on-premises due to low latency or local data processing needs. AWS Outposts infrastructure is fully managed, maintained, and supported by AWS to deliver access to the latest AWS services. In addition, AWS Outposts comes in two varieties: first, an extension of the fast-growing VMware Cloud on AWS service that runs on AWS Outposts; second, AWS Outposts that allow customers to run compute and storage on-premises using the same native AWS APIs used in the AWS Cloud. Simply log into the AWS Management Console to order your AWS Outposts servers, choosing from a wide range of compute and storage options. Learn more.
5. (In Preview) Improve Forecast Accuracy: Based on technology developed by Amazon.com, Amazon Forecast is a fully managed service that uses machine learning to produce highly accurate forecasts. Just like personalization, forecasting has traditionally been a bit of a dark art, where customers try to predict future trends in supply chain, inventory levels, and product demand, based on historical data. Instead, Amazon Forecast packages our years of experience in building and operating scalable, highly accurate forecasting technology into an easy-to-use service. Learn more.
6. Manage Time Series Data: Amazon Timestream is a purpose-built time series database that efficiently stores and processes this data by time intervals. While relational databases can store this data, they are inefficient at processing it, as they lack optimizations such as storing and retrieving data by time intervals. Amazon Timestream offers a fast, serverless and fully managed time series database so customers can process trillions of time series events per day (e.g. sensor data, log data for DevOps, industrial applications, telemetry data, and more), and it is 1,000 times faster and at 1/10th the cost of relational databases. Learn more.
7. (Coming Soon) Replace Costly Tape Storage with a Cloud Archive: Amazon Glacier Deep Archives is the lowest cost storage offered by any cloud provider. Priced from just $0.00099/GB per month ($1.01 per TB per month), the cost is comparable to tape archival services. Data can be retrieved in 12 hours or less, and there a bulk retrieval option that will allow you to inexpensively retrieve even petabytes of data within 48 hours. Learn more.
8. Adopt a Cryptographically Verifiable Ledger for Security Apps: Amazon QLDB provides a high-performance, immutable, cryptographically verifiable ledger for applications where multiple parties work with a centralized, trusted authority to maintain a complete, verifiable record of transactions. With QLDB, your data’s change history is immutable – it cannot be altered or deleted – and using cryptography, you can easily verify that there have been no unintended modifications to your application’s data. Learn more.
9. Create an Immutable Blockchain Network to Protect Data: Amazon Managed Blockchain makes it easy and cost-effective to create, manage, and scale blockchain networks for multiple parties to transact in a decentralized manner without the need for a centralized, trusted authority. And Amazon Managed Blockchain can replicate an immutable copy of your blockchain network activity into Amazon QLDB. Learn more.
10. Extract Text from Virtually Any Digital Document: Amazon Textract lets you easily extract text and data from virtually any scanned document. Many organizations today extract data from documents and forms through manual data entry that’s slow and expensive. Or they use simple optical character recognition (OCR) software that is difficult to customize, however, if the form deviates from the rules, the output is often scrambled and unusable. Amazon Textract overcomes these challenges by using machine learning to instantly “read” virtually any type of document to accurately extract text and data without the need for any manual effort or custom code. Learn more.

Find out about all of the new AWS services here, and view our online talks here. Also, participate in re:Invent recaps online here. Contact your Account Manager to schedule an Executive Briefing Conference (EBC) for your team.