Author: Max Peterson

As we begin the new year, the AWS worldwide public sector (WWPS) team wanted to share a few of our predictions for public sector technology in 2023. We hope these predictions will help guide and inspire you as you continue your digital transformation journey this year.

Today marks World Health Day, and this year’s theme is “Our planet, our health.” The World Health Organization (WHO) is using this day to drive global attention to the urgent actions needed to protect our planet and prioritize well-being in societies, and supporting these efforts is core to our principles and values at AWS. We’re proud to support our customers and partners who are solving some of society’s biggest problems with the cloud to make these ideas and changes a reality. Here are just a few examples of how our customers are leveraging AWS technology to innovate for our planet and our health.

On March 16, I had the honor of kicking off the Build(Her) Conference in Washington, DC, a co-hosted Halcyon and AWS event, along with Kate Goodall, Halcyon co-founder and chief executive officer (CEO). First launched in 2020, the Build(Her) Conference brings together women leaders and entrepreneurs from both the public and private sectors to share ideas, network, and hear from speakers on topics like government innovation, fundraising and growing companies, resilience, and more.

AWS Top Secret-West is accredited to operate workloads at the Top Secret U.S. security classification level. The new Region adds multiple Availability Zones geographically separated from AWS Top Secret-East. With two Top Secret Regions, customers in the U.S. defense, intelligence, and national security communities can deploy multi-Region architectures to achieve the highest levels of resiliency and availability essential to their most critical national security missions.

Soon to be located at Amazon’s Arlington, Virginia Headquarters (HQ2), the AWS Innovation Studio will serve as a center for scaling the impact our customers can have on improving the communities in which we live, work, and learn. Together, public sector organizations, policy makers, citizens, industry leaders, and academia will collaborate with Amazon experts at the AWS Innovation Studio to find new ways to address some of the world’s most pressing societal issues such as housing insecurity, climate change, sustainability, and education inequality.

For more than 150 years, Children’s National Hospital has worked to bring health and well-being to children around the world. Today, it is among the nation’s top 10 children’s hospitals and is transforming pediatric medicine for all children. Recently, the hospital opened the Children’s National Research & Innovation Campus (CNRIC). Amazon Web Services (AWS) is pleased to help launch this one-of-a-kind hub for pediatric medical discovery, innovation, and care.

AWS is announcing a new global program to support organizations working to enhance health outcomes for underserved or underrepresented communities. We are providing AWS credits and technical expertise, committing $40 million over three years to help organizations develop solutions to improve health outcomes.

In 2020, education transformed like never before. Educational institutions needed to be able to provide students, teachers, and staff with immediate access to education and AWS helped customers and partners modernize their systems and applications and reach learners remotely, quickly, and at scale. In 2021, innovation continues in the world of teaching, learning, and research—as well as the use of technology to automate processes and drive better student outcomes.

I recently had the opportunity to record the keynote for this year’s AWS Public Sector Summit Online. This year’s keynote theme is “Inspiration Everywhere,” and I can’t wait to share a number of inspiring stories and examples from our customers with you when the keynote airs on April 15. What unites all of the stories is a commitment to achieving mission outcomes with AWS and cloud computing. And while we’ll spend some time talking about the technology, I’ll also share with you the organizational changes that mission owners can drive, today, to move fast, be responsive, and maximize the impact of limited resources.

Using data for commercial advantage and improved citizen services is at the heart of Europe’s next wave of initiatives. GAIA-X is an initiative that aims to bring together representatives from business, science, and politics to help define standards for the next generation of data infrastructure, which includes an open transparent and secure digital ecosystem, where data and services can be made available, collated, and shared in an environment of trust. AWS has participated in multiple GAIA-X technical working groups and has actively supported the initiative from its beginning. We’re here to help our European customers and partners accelerate cloud-driven innovation in Europe—to compete at home and globally. As we announce our membership of GAIA-X, it’s important to understand what’s driving our involvement and support.