Author: Teresa Carlson

When I travel around the world, I try to spend time with women leaders in different organizations, industries, and walks of life. In the time we have together, I try to learn about their hopes and dreams. In those conversations, I hear both a desire to think big about the future and a struggle to balance the commitments and responsibilities that fall almost exclusively to women. The numbers are clear: the percentage of the women participating in the global labor force is declining. I recently wrote about steps we can take to recover from the last year. Today, I want to share three stories that make me hopeful that we can collectively achieve gender parity. 

Over the past few months, one of the biggest challenges for organizations and employees alike has been the sudden transition to remote work. But we have learned that remote work works when the right technology and leadership come together. Check out some impactful stories that demonstrate how governments have gone above and beyond using the cloud to quickly adapt to this new environment and shift away from the status quo.

From speeding the time to science to accelerating the delivery of critical citizen services, our customers are migrating to the AWS Cloud to successfully deliver on their missions. Our current environment has pushed us all into new ways of learning, working, and even socializing. And the cloud has made these recent changes and innovations possible. These customer examples can offer a playbook and inspiration for how organizations can leverage the cloud to innovate quickly and deliver on behalf of citizens.

Due to COVID-19, schools quickly shifted to remote education to meet students’ needs and wrap up the school year. But with a new school year upon us and social distancing measures still in place, many classes will not gather in traditional classroom settings. Millions of students are now learning in their homes. And public sector leaders are creating new models to ensure learning is sustainable and accessible to all. These changes certainly carry their own set of challenges, but they also open new possibilities for the coming school year. Check out examples of how the COVID-19 pandemic has spurred important solutions to existing problems from primary school to higher education, and how the cloud has opened up new possibilities for educators and students as they start the new school year.

The topic of food insecurity is personal for so many of us. Both of my parents were school teachers in Pulaski County, Kentucky, a county that has a 21.3 percent food insecurity rate for children—the same rate of childhood hunger as where I live now in Washington, DC. According to the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), more than 11 million children across the country struggle with hunger and live in food insecure households. Here are ways that AWS technology is helping address this challenging issue.

I am happy to share that the first AWS Public Sector Summit Online will happen virtually on Tuesday, June 30, 2020. Registration is now open, and we are building an experience that you will be able to access right from your own home. Leading up to the Summit, I am also excited to announce the release of a new, five-part series of the Fix This podcast. I will be one of the guest hosts, and I look forward to speaking with government, education, and healthcare customers about how they are solving some of the world’s most pressing challenges with technology.

Far above the clouds, one of the fastest growing missions for the public sector is taking place. Technological advances and open data initiatives provide new paths to explore space, impacting our lives here on Earth. From satellites to rovers, cloud computing and cloud-enabled technologies help us find answers to our biggest questions.

From school districts to researchers to governments, our customers are maintaining business and educational continuity while being focused on protecting their citizens, students, and patients. How can we provide equal access to high-quality learning opportunities to all? How can we remove barriers set by distance and circumstance? How can we make services more accessible for everyone regardless of language, location, or differing learning needs? We believe the cloud can help.

I grew up in a farming community in Kentucky, and understand how critical agriculture is to the development of a thriving and robust economy. So what can technology do to make farming and agriculture more sustainable and climate-resilient? How can we make sure crops are high quality and high yield? How do we make sure that we get them to market when they are fresh? How can we improve the way farmers interact with each other? Our customers are helping to answer these questions.

The ubiquity of always-on, high performance infrastructure is fueling the rapid pace of innovation. Now more than ever, government and private companies can take advantage of affordable and scalable systems to test new ideas, evolve more quickly to meet the needs of their citizens and customers, and operate more securely. And yet, many institutions have not started on their digital journey because they lack a workforce with the advanced skills they need to drive transformational change.