Building resilient public sector cloud services: Why it’s time to update your strategy

Our public sector customers rely on the resilience of the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud so they can deliver on their critical missions. In the face of growing risks of cyberattacks and environmental threats, like floods or earthquakes, and physical risks, like equipment failures, public sector leaders have an increasingly complex job to do. And yet, citizens expect government services like elections or passport renewal to work as efficiently and reliably as the online commercial platforms they use.

Governments and regulated industries like financial services run essential digital services, such as banking or digital tax platforms. These services are fundamental parts of our lives, and they need to keep operating through or recover from disruptions—a quality known as resilience. In addition, they must remain operational with minimal downtime, a state which we refer to as high availability.

Historically, the resilience of these services has largely depended on physical infrastructure. Before the cloud, to increase application resilience you would add another rack in another data center, and to improve it further still, you would use a data center tens or hundreds of kilometers away.

But now there is more to resilience than just infrastructure. The way organizations build applications is constantly changing; just as security is a shared responsibility, so, too, is resilience. It is vital that organizations learn about the tools and techniques that can help them build and manage resilient cloud applications and understand how to maintain the most resilient services for the communities they serve.

Building a culture of resilient operations

To answer these questions, AWS Principal Technologist Rob Charlton and the Public Sector Industries team have put together a video series sharing why traditional approaches to digital service resilience need updating to take full advantage of the increased resiliency the cloud offers.

In this eight-part series, which you can treat like a resilience playbook, Rob takes viewers through the evolution from legacy infrastructure-focused resilience to today’s comprehensive approach incorporating microservices, infrastructure, monitoring, and operational excellence.

In episode one, Rob introduces the Resilience Equation, a framework showing how the foundational infrastructure of AWS combines with your application architecture, software design, and operations to create truly resilient services. Through clear visualizations and real-world examples, Rob explores how modern application architectures have changed failure patterns, as well as the shared responsibility model for resilience between AWS and customers.

He continues in the second episode with a deep dive into how the unique global nested model of AWS infrastructure—which includes data centers, Availability Zones, and Regions—is the foundation for resilient digital services. In episode three, Rob is joined by Senior Principal Security Solutions Architect Stephen “Squigg” Quigg as they dive further into the ways in which AWS has designed its data centers with an “embrace failure” mindset—employing purpose-built hardware, re-coding software, and meticulous security measures. From power distribution to networking redundancy, every aspect is engineered to maximize resilience while enhancing performance.

The series continues with exploration of specific AWS services, with Rob guiding viewers through the deployment models of specific AWS services, highlighting how these architectural choices impact the resilience and availability of public sector applications.

In episode four, Rob returns to infrastructure to explain how moving your on-premises application to the cloud mitigates the biggest risks, before turning to the teams behind the AWS services, some of their operational practices, and how they deploy updates in episode five. The series rounds out with discussions of services and monitoring. With concrete tips throughout, the series concludes with a host of best practices for building resilient cloud applications in the public sector.

Conclusion

Whether you’re in financial services, federal, state, or local government, or any sector requiring highly available services, this series will show you how the global infrastructure, service design, and operational practices of AWS can create the resilience foundation for your most critical workloads.

Watch the full series here, and read more about AWS Cloud resilience here.