Category: government

We are pleased to announce that AWS GovCloud (US) has received a Provisional Authority to Operate (P-ATO) from the Joint Authorization Board (JAB) under the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) High baseline, a standardized set of security requirements for cloud services. AWS is one of the first cloud service providers (CSP) to meet the FedRAMP High baseline, which includes over 400 security controls, and gives U.S. government agencies the ability to leverage the AWS Cloud for highly sensitive workloads, including Personal Identifiable Information (PII), sensitive patient records, financial data, law enforcement data, and other Controlled Unclassified Information (CUI).

Compliance without compromise is possible with AWS GovCloud (US) and this recognition validates AWS GovCloud (US) as a secure environment to run highly sensitive government workloads.

“We are pleased to have achieved the FedRAMP High baseline, giving agencies a simplified path to moving their highly sensitive workloads to AWS so they can immediately begin taking advantage of the cloud’s agility and cost savings,” said Teresa Carlson, Vice President Worldwide Public Sector, AWS. “Over 2,300 government customers across the world are using the AWS Cloud to innovate in amazing ways – from analyzing data on social media to collect information on adverse drug effects, to making genomic data publicly accessible, to collecting images from Mars. By demonstrating the security of the AWS Cloud with the FedRAMP High baseline, agencies can confidently use our services for an even broader set of critical mission applications and innovations.”

What is FedRAMP High?

• FedRAMP is a U.S. government-wide program that provides a standardized approach to security assessment, authorization, and continuous monitoring for cloud products and services.
• The new FedRAMP High baseline applies to non-classified technology systems under the Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA), with “High” characterized as if the loss of confidentiality, integrity, or availability of that data could be expected to have a severe or catastrophic effect on organizational operations, assets, or individuals. For example, these more sensitive workloads may include sensitive patient records, financial data, or law enforcement data.

This authorization continues AWS’s leadership in attaining security and compliance certifications, and applies to the AWS GovCloud (US) Region, including Amazon Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2), Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), Amazon Identity and Access Management (IAM), and Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS). Launched in 2011, the AWS GovCloud (US) is an isolated region designed to host sensitive workloads in the cloud. In addition to FedRAMP, AWS GovCloud (US) adheres to U.S. International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR), Criminal Justice Information Services (CJIS) requirements, as well as Levels 2 and 4 for DoD systems.

Address your most stringent regulatory and compliance requirements while meeting your mission with the AWS GovCloud (US). To learn more about the AWS and FedRAMP compliance, please visit http://aws.amazon.com/compliance/fedramp/

Register now for our webinar, “FedRAMP High & AWS GovCloud (US): Meet FISMA High Requirements in the Cloud,” to learn more about how you can architect solutions in compliance with the FedRAMP High Baseline, ITAR, HIPAA, and the DoD Cloud Computing Security Requirements Guide (SRG) Levels 2 and 4.

Today, we announced the winners of the third City on a Cloud Innovation Challenge, a global program to recognize local and regional governments and developers that are innovating for the benefit of citizens using the AWS Cloud. Fifteen winners were selected by a panel of worldwide experts based on the impact of their solution, likelihood of long-term success, implementation of AWS services, and the potential to help other local governments solve similar challenges. Winners are awarded AWS credits for AWS services. We also recognized the Land Transport Authority of Singapore with the Cloud Innovation Leadership Award.

Five winners were selected for the Best Practices Award, recognizing innovative local government projects running on the AWS Cloud that are making an impact.

1. City of Los Angeles, California
2. District of Columbia Health Benefit Exchange Authority
3. Peterborough City Council, UK
4. New York Public Library
5. Utah.gov

Five winners were selected for the Dream Big Award, which recognizes the best ideas for a cloud innovation that have not yet been implemented.

1. City of Boston
2. City of Denver
3. Eduserv
4. Miami-Dade County
5. South Central Planning and Development Commission

Five winners were selected for the Partners in Innovation Award, recognizing applications that solve local government challenges.

1. Appriss
2. GRIDSMART
3. OpenDataSoft
4. SmartProcure
5. Utility, Inc.

One special recognition, the Cloud Innovation Leadership Award, was provided to Land Transport Authority of Singapore, an early adopter of cloud computing for the benefit of citizens.

Over the next few weeks on the blog, we will be diving deep into the innovative solutions these cities and partners are leveraging to deliver citizen services using the cloud. Learn more about the City on a Cloud Innovation Challenge here.

We have launched the AWS Marketplace for the U.S. Intelligence Community (IC) to meet the needs of our IC customers.

The AWS Marketplace for the U.S. IC makes it easy to discover, purchase, and deploy software packages and applications from vendors with a strong presence in the IC in a cloud that is not connected to the public Internet.

Based on the feedback from our customers in this community, we are pleased to be able to offer a selection of Third Party Products at launch in Big Data and Analytics, Cloud Transition Support, DevOps, Geospatial and Information Assurance, and Security Services to help them further their mission.

While this marketplace is designed for the U.S. IC, other federal agencies can use the same products through the AWS Marketplace. AWS marketplaces bring value to government organizations through:

• Selection – Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) or Authorized Resellers can list within government constraints, allowing our government customers to find, purchase, and deploy software using hourly utility computing or annual subscription offerings (see below for steps to get products in the AWS Marketplace for the U.S. IC).
• Fast procurement – Buy only what is needed with pay-as-you-go pricing.
• Easy deployment – Customers can launch products using the AWS One-Click deployment feature within the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) console, and easily test and evaluate software.

If you are a vendor interested in listing in the AWS Marketplace for the U.S. IC, or are a customer that cannot find a specific product, we would love to hear from you. Please contact icmp@amazon.com and let us know. We are always looking to add new selections.

As an ISV or Authorized Reseller, these are the requirements for selling on the AWS Marketplace for the U.S. Intelligence Community:

• Get your company and products listed in the AWS Marketplace.
• Submit a U.S. Intelligence Foreign Ownership Control and Influence (FOCI) packet, and agree to the terms and conditions applicable to the AWS Marketplace for U.S. IC.
• Ensure your products will work in the Commercial Cloud Services (C2S) space; this means that your products do not make any calls to the public internet and do not attempt to access any external resources.

For assistance in this process, email us (icmp@amazon.com). We’ll help with the paperwork and help you get going as quickly as possible. To learn more about this process, read the AWS Partner Network Blog.

Learn more about why we are excited about the new AWS Marketplace for the Intelligence Community in Jeff Barr’s blog post here.

We are pleased to announce the AWS Government Competency and the new AWS GovCloud (US) Skill Program as well as those partners who have been recognized with those distinctions.

The AWS Government Competency

AWS Government Competency Partners have deep experience working with government customers to deliver mission-critical workloads and applications on AWS. Customers working with AWS Government Competency Partners will have access to innovative, cloud-based solutions that comply with the highest AWS standards.

Customers can explore partner solutions across a number of industry areas:

Government Transportation, Facilities, and Infrastructure Management – Solutions that allow civic leaders to more efficiently address their complex transportation needs from analytics to fleet and asset management.

Justice and Public Safety – Solutions that enable law enforcement and public safety agencies to make informed, data-driven decisions, improve operational efficiencies, and securely store and manage video workloads.

Public Healthcare – Solutions to increase the agility and innovation of public health organizations while meeting unique data protection requirements.

Financial and Fiscal Affairs – Solutions in financial modeling and analytic systems that ingest, process, and visualize data at scale.

Citizen Services – Solutions to enhance and innovate government engagement with their citizens.

National Security and Defense – Solutions that service the national security and defense community to increase cybersecurity posture and IT agility in a cost-effective way to ensure mission success.

Security and Compliance – Solutions that help government customers build, operate, and certify their systems in accordance with global security and compliance requirements. These governance-focused solutions have automated audit-friendly service features and meet broad security standards and frameworks.

Open Data – Services that improve access to publicly available sources of data via data portals, developer tools, and APIs.

Congratulations to the following partners who have achieved the AWS Government Competency designation:

Consulting Partners

• A&T Systems Inc.
• Accenture Federal Services
• Aquilent, Inc.
• Arcus Global
• Avanxo
• Booz Allen Hamilton
• Cloudmas
• CSRA
• DLT Solutions, Inc.
• InfoReliance Corporation
• Itera
• JHC Technology Inc.
• Lockheed Martin Corporation
• REAN Cloud
• SmartSimple Software Inc.
• Smartronix, Inc.
• Soluciones Orion
• Unisys Corporation

Technology Partners – Offering software products designed for government workloads with proven success in government agencies.

• Adobe Experience Manager
• CloudCheckr Cost and Security Management
• Infor CloudSuite Public Sector
• NS2 Cloud – SuccessFactors Suite with NS2 Secure CloudEdge
• SmartSimple Software
• Splunk Cloud
• Trend Micro Deep Security Platform

Learn more about this program and our partners here.

AWS GovCloud (US) Skill Program

As adoption of AWS GovCloud (US) continues to grow, our customers increasingly need the ability to easily identify AWS Partners with expertise and skills in the AWS GovCloud (US) region. The AWS GovCloud (US) Skill Program provides customers with the ability to readily identify APN Partners with experience supporting workloads in the AWS GovCloud (US) Region. The program identifies APN Consulting Partners with experience in architecting, operating and managing workloads in GovCloud, and APN Technology Partners with software products that are available in AWS GovCloud (US).

Congratulations to the following partners who have achieved the AWS GovCloud (US) Skill designation:

• Adobe Systems Incorporated
• Accenture Federal Services
• Appian Corporation
• Aquilent, Inc.
• Barracuda Networks, Inc.
• Cloudnexa
• CSRA
• DLT Solutions, Inc.
• Druva
• Enlighten IT Consulting, Inc.
• InfoReliance Corporation
• JHC Technology, Inc.
• Natoma Technologies
• Racemi, Inc.
• SAP National Security Services™ (SAP NS2™)
• Smartronix, Inc.
• Splunk

Congratulations again to both our Government Competency Partners and partners with the AWS GovCloud (US) Skill Program, who are helping our customers meet their missions.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is pleased to announce that we have signed a Criminal Justice Information Services (CJIS) agreement with the State of Colorado. Colorado is the latest CJIS agreement we’ve signed, on the heels of CJIS agreements with California Department of Justice and Minnesota. We’re working hard to execute agreements with many other law enforcement customers, and are committed to maintaining a comprehensive security program consistent with federal and state laws, regulations, standards and the requirements of the FBI CJIS Security Policy.

With this CJIS agreement, law enforcement throughout the State of Colorado can leverage cloud technology in ways that increase IT and data security, improve operational efficiencies, and provide access to next-generation technologies and tools that are made possible with the AWS Cloud.

The Future of Policing is in the Cloud

Cloud opens the door to the future of policing. From body-worn cameras, video storage, and digital evidence management to records management systems, analytics, information sharing, and Internet of Things (IoT), AWS and our AWS Partner Network (APN) community enable law enforcement to use technology that is secure, reliable, and cost-effective.

To consistently meet the needs of our customers, we start with what they need and work backwards. Beginning with a focus on security, we work vigorously to earn the trust of our customers. Building the foundation with the AWS infrastructure, our customers and partners are able to meet any use case, including crime forecasting, secure messaging and mass alerts, e-citation, and more.

“We recognize that when law enforcement agencies place data in the cloud, they put an absolute priority on secure access to information, wherever and whenever it is needed. To meet these needs, the AWS Cloud infrastructure has been architected to be the most secure, reliable, and flexible cloud computing environment in the world,” said Teresa Carlson, Vice President of AWS Worldwide Public Sector. “We will continue to work hand-in-hand with our justice and public safety customers and partners so that they can confidently use the AWS Cloud with all the powerful security features, tools, and best practices it offers, while focusing on their core missions – keeping our nation safe.”

Today, AWS has over one million active users including over 2,000 government agencies. Law enforcement throughout the country are taking advantage of the possibilities that cloud technology can deliver. AWS is helping them deliver on their mission. Please reach out if you would like to get started.

We are excited to announce that over one million electronic IRS 990 filings are available via Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). Filings from 2011 to the present are currently available and the IRS will add new 990 filing data each month.

Form 990 is the form used by the United States Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to gather financial information about nonprofit organizations. By making electronic 990 filing data available, the IRS has made it possible for anyone to programmatically access and analyze information about individual nonprofits or the entire nonprofit sector in the United States. This also makes it possible to analyze it in the cloud without having to download the data or store it themselves, which lowers the cost of product development and accelerates analysis.

Each electronic 990 filing is available as a unique XML file in the “irs-form-990” S3 bucket in the AWS US East (N. Virginia) region. Information on how the data is organized and what it contains is available on the IRS 990 Filings on AWS Public Data Set landing page.

Users of the data can easily access individual XML files or write scripts to organize 990 data into a database using Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) or into a data warehouse using Amazon Redshift. Amazon Elastic MapReduce (Amazon EMR) can also be used to quickly process the entire set of filings for analysis.

Collaborating with the IRS allows us to improve access to this valuable data. Making machine-readable data available in bulk on Amazon S3 is an efficient way to empower a variety of users to analyze the data using whatever tools or services they prefer. We look forward to seeing what new services people are able to create to analyze the 990 filing data available on Amazon S3.

The geospatial intelligence (GEOINT) community is at an inflection point – changing the way humans interact with where we are, what we’re doing, and how we understand and characterize activity on Earth. Technology greatly influences this revolution. And cloud computing will impact government’s mission.

Major themes

Throughout the United States Geospatial Intelligence Foundation (USGIF)’s GEOINT conference, we heard a few major themes presented in many of the sessions and the keynotes, including:

1. Cloud Migration – Cloud enables many benefits for organizations of all sizes. Adopting cloud is a journey, requiring a thoughtful strategy to optimize the benefits enabled by cloud.  Technology, people, process, and business need to be considered to enable organizations to build a strategy for successful cloud adoption.
2. Mission Relevance – From the sensor to the warfighter, it is about getting the necessary information into the right hands at the right time. How agencies collect, store, and distribute data affects their bottom-line mission.
3. Acquisition and Procurement – While cloud computing can radically simplify the IT operations in government, it can be tricky to determine the right procurement strategy to get to that result. We heard discussions on the strategies and resources for ensuring a procurement is “cloud-friendly.”
4. Security – Public sector customers’ workloads often must operate in a manner that meets the requirements of compliance regimes. These regimes provide a security framework and, often, a set of security controls that must be provably met in order to operate in any location, whether on-premises or in the cloud.

We saw that government organizations are excited about the cloud, where it will take them, and the impact it will have on their mission. For example, National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) is committed to lead the way for the Intelligence Community (IC) on their adoption to the cloud. Hear Sue Gordon, Deputy Director, NGA, address her vision for open collaboration and a public-private partnership here. Their goal is to get all applications and data into the cloud. By delivering services based on a cloud infrastructure, they are able to quickly deliver these services to the warfighter.

In addition to hearing from NGA, there were many AWS partners in attendance demonstrating how to run data analytics in minutes, not hours.

How can the AWS Cloud help?

Mission Agility – By using AWS, agencies are able to respond to their mission needs with actionable intelligence at a faster rate.

Cost-Effective Spending – One of the most talked-about benefits of AWS is effective IT spending.  Moving existing infrastructure to AWS enables agencies to optimize their IT spending allowing them to focus (almost solely) on the mission. AWS allows you to not only focus on the mission from a funding perspective, but will also free up funding for the mission.

Fast-Paced Innovation – AWS helps agencies to innovate at a faster pace and also allows for increased collaboration, so that more of the Intelligence Community can benefit from the agile cloud environment.

Check out the photos from the AWS booth at the GEOINT conference. We had a great time and appreciated all those who stopped by to learn about AWS and the cloud!

Learn more about how AWS can enable more mission for the money, acquisition strategies in government, and optimizing security while reducing costs at the AWS Public Sector Summit in Washington, DC June 20-21. Register for the complimentary, two-day event here.

We are excited to announce the 2016 City on a Cloud Innovation Challenge finalists. We received a record amount of applicants in our third annual challenge from cities, counties, and municipalities all over the world. From Israel to the United Kingdom, we received applications showing how government leaders are making use of the Internet of Things, open data, and analytics, leading to the creation new citizen services. Thank you to all who applied!

Click here to learn more about the finalists and their projects, including real-time transportation applications, public safety services, and GIS projects, all using the AWS Cloud.

We look forward to announcing the winners at the AWS Public Sector Summit June 20th-21st in Washington, DC! Join us there as we announce the winners in the Best Practices, Dream Big, and Partners in Innovation categories.

The International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR) in Western Australia has recently announced a new scientific finding using innovative data processing and visualization techniques developed on AWS. Astronomers at ICRAR have been involved in the detection of radio emissions from hydrogen in a galaxy more than 5 billion light years away. This is almost twice the previous record for the most distant hydrogen emissions observed, and has important implications for understanding how galaxies have evolved over time.

Figure 1: The Very Large Array on the Plains of San Agustin Credit: D. Finley, NRAO/AUI/NSF

Working with large and fast growing data sets like these requires new scalable tools and platforms that ICRAR is helping to develop for the astronomy community. The Data Intensive Astronomy (DIA) program at ICRAR, led by Dr Andreas Wicenec, used AWS to experiment with new methods of analyzing and visualizing data coming from the Very Large Array (VLA) at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in New Mexico. AWS has enabled the DIA team to quickly prototype new data processing pipelines and visualization tools without spending millions in precious research funds that are better spent on astronomers than computers. As data volumes grow, the team can scale their processing and visualization tools to accommodate that growth. In this case, the DIA team prototyped and built a platform to process 10s of TBs of raw data and reduce this data to a more manageable size. They then make that data available in what they refer to as a ‘data cube.’

Figure 2: An image of the full data cube constructed by ICRAR

This image shows the full data cube constructed by the team at ICRAR. The cube provides a data visualization model that allows astronomers, like Dr. Attila Popping and his team at ICRAR, to search in either space or time through large images created from observations made with the VLA. Astronomers can interact with the data cube in real-time and stream it to their desktop. Having access to the full data set like this in an interactive fashion makes it possible to find new objects of interest that would otherwise not be seen or would be much more difficult to find.

ICRAR estimates that the amount of network, compute, and storage capacity required to shift and crunch this data would have made this work infeasible. By using AWS, they were able to quickly and cheaply build their new pipelines, and then scale them as massive amounts of data arrived from their instruments. They used the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) Spot market, accessing AWS’s spare capacity at 50-90% less than the standard on-demand pricing, thereby reducing costs even further and leading the way for many researchers as they look to leverage AWS in their own fields of research.  When super-science projects like the Square Kilometer Array (SKA) come online, they’ll be ready. Without the cloud to enable their experiments, they would still be investigating how to do the experiments, instead of actually conducting them.

We are privileged to work with customers who are pushing the boundaries of science using AWS, and expanding our understanding of the universe at the same time. In Figure 3, you can see an artist’s impression of the newly discovered hydrogen emissions from a galaxy more than 5 billion light years away from Earth. To learn more about the work performed by the ICRAR team, please read their media release.

Figure 3: An artist’s impression of the discovered hydrogen emissions

To learn more about how customers are using AWS for Scientific Computing, please visit our Scientific Computing on AWS website.

Images provided by and used with permission of the International Centre of Radio Astronomy Research.

We are excited to announce that Alces Flight has made hundreds of science and HPC applications available in the AWS Marketplace, making it easy for any researcher to spin up any size High Performance Computing (HPC) cluster in the AWS Cloud.

In the past, researchers often had to wait in line for the computing power for scientific discovery. With Alces Flight, you can take your compute projects from 0 to 60 in a few minutes. Researchers and scientists can quickly spin up multiple nodes with pre-installed compilers, libraries, and hundreds of scientific computing applications. Flight comes with a catalog of more than 750 built-in scientific computing applications, libraries and versions, covering nearly everything from engineering, chemistry and genomics, to statistics and remote sensing.

After designing and managing hundreds of HPC workflows for national and academic supercomputing centers in the United Kingdom, Alces built and validated HPC workflows tailored to researchers and automated applications built for supercomputing centers. They are now making that catalog available in the AWS Marketplace.

Take Flight today with AWS & Alces Flight

The Alces Flight portfolio of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offerings provides researchers with on-demand HPC clusters or ‘self-service supercomputers’ in minutes. With hundreds of science and HPC apps available in the AWS Marketplace, Alces Flight helps you automatically create a research-ready environment that complements Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS), Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) resources in the AWS Cloud.

Researchers get:

• Instant access to a popular catalog of hundreds of HPC and scientific computing apps that rival those available at supercomputing centers.
• Access to HPC clusters available for use any time, from anywhere, at virtually any scale, and at the lowest possible cost with Amazon EC2 Spot Instances pricing.
• Instant on-demand access to powerful scientific computing tools that make global collaboration easy.

Read more about this announcement on Jeff Barr’s blog here. And get started and see the Alces Flight portfolio of apps in the AWS Marketplace.