Tag: government

In 2020, the U.S. Army’s XVIII Airborne Corps embarked on a mission to become the Army’s data-centric Corps. Headquartered at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, the XVIII Airborne Corps—also known as the “America’s Contingency Corps” — is the Army’s strategic response force and is at the ready to deploy anywhere in the world to defend the US and its Allies. To enable their data ambitions, the XVIII Airborne Corps sought to establish the first enduring tactical cloud presence for the conventional Army and leveraged the AWS Cloud to support their journey.

The Uniformed Services University Health System (USUHS) is the nation’s federal health professions academy, offering a curriculum and educational experience that emphasizes military healthcare, leadership, readiness, and public health. Each year, USUHS holds a training exercise called Operation Gunpowder to help prepare third-year medical students for varying field-care challenges they may encounter during their service. Over the course of the eight weeks prior to the training exercise, AWS collaborated with Deloitte to deliver ancillary system and operational medicine telemedicine best practice training to the participating students. “This is the first time telemed has truly delivered,” reported attending experts in special operations medicine.

AWS is committed to supporting the mission of our Department of Defense (DoD) customers by providing innovative, efficient, and effective solutions. In support of this commitment, we are announcing the availability of DoD Cloud Infrastructure as Code (IaC) for AWS – a baseline that uses a collection of templates to enable defense mission owners to quickly build out secure, scalable cloud environments. DoD Cloud IaC for AWS is designed to help DoD organizations accelerate cloud adoption and support the rapid delivery of capabilities to the warfighter.

To prevent citizens from falling behind on their mortgages, the federal government awarded states $10 billion from the Homeowner Assistance Fund (HAF), delivered under the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021. This funding required sign-off from the US Department of the Treasury to access and the funds needed to be distributed quickly. AWS customer ProLink Solutions supported states with rapidly designing and deploying new programs and workflows, which helped states acquire these funds and quickly deliver them to citizens in need.

Whether filing taxes, applying for student financial aid, seeking healthcare coverage, or receiving disaster support, every interaction with the federal government is an opportunity to strengthen the customer experience with rich citizen engagement and direct lines of feedback. But legacy technology, siloed data, lack of digital skills, and a one-size-fits-all design approach can limit the ability of government to meet the demands of their constituents. Using cloud technology and AWS can improve customer understanding, create personalized interactions, and modernize constituent experiences.

May is Military Appreciation Month, providing an opportunity to recognize and show our appreciation for the US armed services and the important role they play in protecting and preserving our national security. The month includes celebrations and moments to recognize those in and out of uniform, as well as those that have and continue to serve. AWS is committed to supporting our veterans, active duty military, and military spouses. As we begin Military Appreciation Month, we are sharing progress made on our programs and efforts to support the military community.

In the past two years, many of us in Latin America have seen civil society, governments, academia, and the private sector unite to accelerate our ability to respond to the economic and human challenges of COVID-19. Public sector organizations innovated with the cloud to address a variety of dynamic needs: expanding financial inclusion, supporting wider access to education and healthcare, providing transparency in electoral processes, and more. In this blog post, we spotlight four organizations in Latin America that are using AWS to transform the public sector.

Since 1971, Canada Centre for Mapping and Earth Observation (CCMEO) at Natural Resources Canada (NRCan) has accumulated an Earth observation (EO) data archive in excess of two petabytes (PB). NRCan wanted to modernize its geospatial offerings at a faster pace, so they turned to the AWS Snow Family on AWS to migrate their large volume of data.

In a recent disaster response field testing exercise (FTX), the AWS Global Social Impact Solutions (GSI) team developed a prototype cloud architecture and tested it in a search and rescue (SAR) scenario simulating a missing responder crisis. This blog post walks through the SAR simulation and result, and provides an overview of the AWS services and technical architecture components the GSI team used to provide a hybrid edge/cloud COP solution that helped locate the missing team member in the simulated scenario within 20 minutes.

Before building in the cloud, government agencies need to determine how they want to allocate cloud costs in accordance with their jurisdictions’ transparency requirements and legislative oversight. A cloud cost allocation strategy–deciding how to distribute cloud costs to the users or beneficiaries of those incurred costs in a pre-defined way—is a foundational part of any agency’s cloud journey. Even though every organization’s cost allocation model may be unique, there are some common patterns, approaches, and best practices that you can leverage to design an effective strategy to meet your organization’s needs.