Category: Technical How-to

Customer managed encryption keys are a common architecture requirement within highly regulated workloads. This post demonstrates how to satisfy this requirement within Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), including Amazon S3 Glacier. We also clarify some common points of confusion and demonstrate how objects can be uploaded directly to Amazon S3 Glacier via Amazon S3, which can help meet regulatory requirements as well as potentially save budget.

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.

Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) 140-2 specifies the security requirements for cryptographic modules that protect sensitive information. It is the current United States and Canadian government standard, and is applicable to systems that are required to be compliant with Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA) or Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP). In this blog, we demonstrate how to enable FIPS mode in Amazon Linux 2 and verify that unauthorized cryptographic functions are not being used in OpenSSL or the OpenSSH server.

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.

Government agencies and public sector organizations in energy and utilities rely on smart solutions to detect, locate, and fix utilities outages faster based on input from their customer contact centers and field crews. One popular outage management solution (OMS) is Schneider Electric’s ArcFM Responder (Responder) OMS. In this post, we discuss how to deploy the Schneider Electric’s Responder environment on AWS.

With the increase in remote work and education, government, education, and nonprofit organizations, are adopting virtual desktop solutions like Amazon WorkSpaces. Large scale deployments of virtual desktop solutions can decrease administrative burden and save time. In this post, you can learn how to deploy Amazon WorkSpaces with less engineering effort by leveraging a PowerShell script.

With most everyone off campus, parent and student communications are top of mind for school districts and universities. Amazon Alexa can help extend the classroom to home through integrations with commonly used education technology applications. Now Amazon Alexa can aggregate information across education skills into one response, creating a faster, streamlined, more convenient way to access information.

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.

Public sector organizations are experiencing a high volume of requests for information ranging from health to finances to municipal services. At a time when in-person interaction is limited, citizens can call into contact centers to get the insights they need to make real-time decisions about their health and safety. Many organizations are turning to the cloud to quickly scale and deploy a contact center. But, understanding your cloud contact center at granular level can help better serve your constituents.

Data related to healthcare, in both volume and variety, is undergoing a tremendous expansion. One of the best ways to tackle complicated data integration is through a data lake: a centralized, curated, and secured repository that stores all your data, both in its original form and prepared for analysis. A data lake enables you to break down data silos and combine different types of analytics, such as data warehousing, big data processing, or operational analytics, to gain insights and guide better business decisions.