Tag: government

Governments around the world want to accelerate their digital transformation to offer simpler access to citizen services online and earn trust with effective solutions. This includes things like being able to send notifications to users, providing a single log-in for government services, or publishing public health information in the wake of a pandemic. The AWS Government Transformation Team is here to help. We highlight available solutions and build new open source solutions that governments can leverage. Before developing new software, establishing a foundation with a sound design system is an important first step so our solutions are consistent, accessible, and simple to use. Read on to learn more about why starting with an open source design system is important and how we selected one for the software we’ve built and will build in the future.

At re:Invent 2020, Teresa Carlson, vice president and leader of AWS public sector and industry business units, shared stories of how cloud technology has proven critical for organizations to move fast and respond to a new reality shaped by COVID-19. Teresa also welcomed customers UK Biobank, Capella Space, and Wefarm to share their own experiences with solving some of the world’s most pressing challenges using the cloud. Here are 10 key takeaways that show what’s next for the public sector.

At AWS, we are mission focused. A mission is a purpose—supported by but not driven by IT. How can the AWS Partner Network (APN) help public sector partners and their customers meet their missions? No matter where you are in your journey to cloud adoption and IT modernization—from getting started, to easing the adoption of technology, to planning to take the solution to market, to growing beyond storage and compute, to renewing and scale—APN and its programs and initiatives can help. During my leadership session at AWS re:Invent 2020, I shared new and noteworthy AWS Public Sector Partner programs available to help partners keep their focus on their mission-critical work while also keeping it simple—and I shared some partner successes along the way.

AWS re:Invent is back for 2020, and for the first time it’s all virtual and free. AWS re:Invent has become the world’s premier cloud learning event, and this year, we’ll feature sessions focused on how public sector organizations are using the cloud to improve the lives of constituents, patients, customers, and more. The event, kicking off on November 30 and lasting three weeks through December 18, will feature keynotes, leadership sessions, lightning talks, and core sessions tailored for the public sector. To help you make the most of re:Invent 2020, we created the AWS re:Invent Public Sector Virtual Attendee Guide, and the latest episode of The Brief.

At the AWS Nonprofit Hackathon for Good, 484 participants built solutions to help relieve the burden on developers in the government who are facing increasing demands on their systems during COVID-19. Hackathon participants were tasked with improving the workflows of the frontline developers who maintain mission-critical COBOL applications. The winning solution created an integrated developer environment (IDE) extension for COBOL syntax highlighting, and is now available in the VS Code Marketplace.

Thank you to all active and retired military members for your service. At Amazon Web Services (AWS), we are honored to work together with our nation’s Veterans—from helping transitioning Veterans begin their pathway in the cloud to hiring military spouses to supporting military families. In celebration of this year’s Veterans Day, check out some of our new resources and additional programs dedicated to serving this community.

As education has shifted to remote delivery, traditional mechanisms for engaging students and creating practical learning opportunities have had to adapt too. One mechanism—the hackathon—is increasingly taking place virtually. Typically, hackathons are in-person technology events where teams or individuals create solutions to a specific problem or challenge in a short timeframe, often 24 hours or a weekend. Hackathons are also social learning events where peers can connect, learn from each other, seek support from technical experts, and produce a cool (even if imperfect) solution. Cloud technology tools and resources can help virtual hackathons be as successful as traditional hackathons.

Nobody wants to lose data—and setting a Recovery Point Objective (RPO) to zero makes this intent clear. Customers with government mission-critical systems often need to meet this requirement, since any amount of data loss will cause harm. RPO covers both resilience and disaster recovery—everything from the loss of an individual physical disk to an entire data center. Existing systems support RPO zero through a combination of architecture patterns (including resilient messaging) and on-premises legacy databases. Frequently interpreted as a database or storage requirement, providing for RPO zero requires thinking about the entire system. To do so, you can use AWS services and architecture patterns, which provide resilience to failure with clustering, auto scaling, and failover across multiple data centers within one region.

The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) released an interim rule, the Defense Federal Acquisition Regulation Supplement: Assessing Contractor Implementation of Cybersecurity Requirements (DFARS Case 2019–D041), which includes NIST SP 800-171 and Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification (CMMC) assessment methodology and requirements. Organizations have been planning for CMMC, and with the release of this interim rule, are now beginning to prepare and build strategy for CMMC compliance. Learn how you can build your CMMC strategy using cloud technologies.

This year, AWS is a gold sponsor of AI for Good, the action-oriented technology-education platform hosted by the United Nations (UN). The organization is delivering a webinar series to provide best practices around how to adopt AI and ML technologies. With less than 10 years remaining to achieve the 17 United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by 2030, organizations all over the world are using AWS services to deliver various AI and ML-enabled solutions—from delivering disaster-relief services at the edge to reconnecting telecommunications after a hurricane. We are also helping organizations adopt AI and ML technologies more readily in the areas of computer vision, automatic speech recognition, and natural language process to solve ongoing global challenges.