Category: government

Buying cloud computing services takes different skills and strategies than buying traditional IT. Are you ready to move to the cloud but looking for practical guidance? Not sure where to start? We’re here to help you select the right acquisition approach for your agency.

As your agency is considering moving to the cloud, there are important topics to consider, which include justifying your move to AWS, organizational and cultural implications, purchasing strategies, architectural considerations, and further optimization to enable innovation and save costs down the line.

1. Scope the project in order to justify your decision: Early planning, communication, and buy-in are essential. Understanding the motivation (time, cost, availability, etc.) is key and will be different for each organization.
2. Map out your acquisition strategies: Well-designed procurement strategies and cloud-centric contract vehicles will make a difference. Getting procurement ‘right,’ will lead to a portfolio of cloud technology and services that truly realizes the benefits of cloud computing.
3. Structure the deal to save costs down the line: The shift from buying hardware to accessing cloud services makes technology faster, easier and less expensive. With AWS, you can use the spot market, save when you reserve, and only pay for what you use. Structure your deal to make use of On-Demand Instances, Reserved Instances, Dedicated Instances, and Spot Instances.
4. Consider implementation strategies to help you get more from your cloud deployment: When choosing to take advantage of the cloud, it is important to consider creating a cloud-first policy for your organization, which requires the consideration of cloud before taking an on-premises approach.
5. Organize to move into production: Define and identify organizational structures and roles, required competencies, competency gaps, training needs, and staffing and organizational changes required to build an agile IT organization that is capable of effective cloud adoption. An organizational model that is optimized for cloud adoption should be established for the delivery and operation of cloud-based solutions.

Discover more details about the steps you need to take to migrate your government or education institution to the cloud – from design to implementation.

Learn more about acquisition and procurement strategies at the AWS Public Sector Summit June 12-14 in Washington, DC.

The Air Force Special Operations Command (AFSOC), headquartered at Hurlburt Field, Florida, is the special operations component of the United States Air Force. Their mission is to provide the Nation’s specialized airpower, capable across the spectrum of conflict – any place, any time. AFSOC strives to stay a step ahead in a changing world, delivering Special Operations power anytime, anywhere.

They rely on AWS GovCloud (US) for its critical mission data to be able to meet their compliance requirements, while also realizing the cost savings, reliability, and flexibility of cloud computing.

By using AWS, the U.S. Air Force Special Operations Command is able to save $3.5 million and serve more than 16,000 active-duty, Air Force Reserve, Air National Guard and civilian personnel globally and securely.

Why AWS GovCloud (US)?

AFSOC needed to centrally store data so people in different places can work with a common set of information, like schedules, post-mission reports, inventories, and plans. AFSOC’s mission requires a lot of flexibility and security, while remaining at a low cost. For highly sensitive data, they need to restrict physical and logical administrative access to U.S. persons only.

AWS GovCloud (US), an isolated AWS region designed to host sensitive data and regulated workloads in the cloud, helps the Air Force support their U.S. government compliance requirements, including the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) and Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP). The Air Forces also uses Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) to automatically and transparently scale to use requirements.

The Benefits

• Global deployment: Their secure facility serves people around the world. The AWS Cloud provides redundant failover to securely serve constituents globally, wherever they are stationed.
• Cost savings: By using AWS, the AFSOC Cloud saves $3.5 million through FY’2019. Through virtualization of services and pooled resources with other government agencies, they are able to save on many costly functions and are no longer left with unused resources.
• Security: They are able to meet the security and compliance requirements of their end users to host highly sensitive data.
• High Reliability: The Air Force experiences 99.99% reliability, delivering mission-critical data quickly. America’s Air Commandos are headquartered in Hurricane Alley. Remote AWS GovCloud (US) regions assure America’s global response capability without fail for local disasters.

Learn more about AWS for defense here.

In the March issue of National Defense, Jennifer Chronis, general manager for the Defense Department (DoD) at Amazon Web Services, shared how defense and intelligence agencies can deploy cloud services to reduce costs, drive efficiencies, and successfully achieve their missions.

Within the article, Jennifer addresses security concerns, the benefits of the cloud, and the contract vehicles needed to tap into the potential of the hyperscale cloud. Below are five ways defense agencies and warfighters can benefit from cloud technology. Read the full article here.

1. Security: While security concerns were a traditional obstacle to increased adoption, there have been substantial advancements over the past two years. There is now widespread recognition in both the public and private sectors that commercial cloud options can be more secure than on-premises solutions.
2. Scalability: One of the most important advantages of the commercial cloud is its virtually limitless scalability when compared to other options.
3. Speed: Another advantage of commercial cloud is the superior speed, power and breadth of functionality available to users.
4. Ease of Development: Perhaps one of the biggest advantages of commercial cloud is the ease and speed of both development and deployment of new applications and platforms.
5. Contract Vehicles: The Defense Department has laid the groundwork to support the increased use of hyperscale commercial cloud. A good next step to consider is the creation of clear and easy contract vehicles, and the necessary funding flexibility, by which its many sub-agencies can quickly and efficiently provision cloud computing services.

The bottom line: cloud can empower the Defense Department to create truly groundbreaking new tools to enable its mission.

Read the full article here and learn how agencies, such as the Defense Information Systems Agency, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, and the Air Force, use the cloud. And learn more about how AWS brings storage and compute to tactical situations.

The Federal 100 Awards recognized 100 federal government and industry leaders who have made pivotal progress in the government IT community and showed what’s possible with technology in 2016 and laid the groundwork for results in 2017.

At AWS, we have the opportunity to work with more than 2,300 government organizations to serve citizens more effectively, achieve scientific breakthroughs, reach more constituents and put more of their time and resources into their core missions.

A special call out to the below winners, who are among the many accelerating their missions using the AWS Cloud:

• Peter Fitzhugh, Assistant Special Agent in Charge, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Department of Homeland Security
• Preston Werntz, Senior Strategist for Analysis and Operations, Office of Cybersecurity and Communications, Department of Homeland Security
• Kevin Murphy, Program Executive for Earth Science Data Systems, NASA
• Tom Soderstrom, Chief Technology and Innovation Officer, NASA JPL
• David Shive, CIO, General Services Administration
• Pamela Dyson, CIO, Securities and Exchange Commission

Congratulations to each of the Federal 100 winners! See the full list and learn more about each of the winners here.

In addition, two of our own Amazonians won – congratulations to Tricia Davis-Muffett and Mark Fox!

Social media, sensor feeds, and scientific data generate large amounts of data and understanding the relationships between this data can be challenging. Graph analytics has emerged as a way to make sense of this allowing analysts to draw conclusions from the patterns in the data and to ask and answer questions, that they previously had been no hope of answering.

By understanding the complex relationships between different data feeds, a more complete picture of the problem can be understood. With lessons learned from innovations in the expanding realm of deep neural networks, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s (DARPA) Hierarchical Identify Verify Exploit (HIVE) program seeks to advance graph analytics.

The DARPA HIVE program is looking to build a graph analytics processor that can process streaming graphs 1000X faster and at much lower power than current processing technology. This will provide the power to advance graph analytics to solve challenges in areas such as cyber security and infrastructure monitoring. In parallel with the development of the HIVE processor, DARPA is hosting the HIVE challenge to develop a trillion-edge dataset with solutions that will contribute to this initiative. The goal is to accelerate innovation in graph analytics to open new pathways for meeting the challenge of understanding an ever-increasing torrent of data.

Organizers will provide specifications, datasets, data generators, and serial implementations in various languages to participants. As part of the Challenge, AWS and DARPA have entered into a collaborative agreement, which represents the first Department of Defense (DoD) Agency to participate in the AWS Public Datasets program. Additionally, eligible researchers doing work with the DARPA HIVE Challenge are encouraged to apply for AWS usage credits via the AWS Cloud Credits for Research program.

There are two initial challenges:

1. The first is a static graph problem focused on sub-graph Isomorphism. This provides the ability to search a large graph in order to identify a particular subsection of that graph.
2. The second is a dynamic graph problem focused on trying to find optimal clusters of data within the graph. Both will have a small graph problems in the billions of nodes and a large graph problem in the trillions of nodes.

Learn more and get involved.

SXSW brought in technology companies, startups, elected officials, and more to Austin to talk about innovation. Mayors are focused on using technology to engage with the citizen and the Civic I/O Mayors Summit at SXSW gave mayors the opportunity to learn from other mayors about how to fuel startup innovation in their cities and how to leverage technology to overcome challenges. At the event, we interviewed many of the mayors in attendance. Watch these videos here.

As we heard about the mayors’ focus on improving the lives of citizens throughout the country, APN partners showcased civic applications during the Civic I/O Mayor’s Garage to help leaders face challenges with air quality, crime, drugs, and health.

HC1 presented its solution that leverages clinical, prescription, and claims data to trend and act on opioid, mental health, and other health issues facing communities. Acivilate demonstrated the Pokket mobile accountability tool, which links justice and Health and Human Service (HHS) agencies with returning citizens to build coordinated rehabilitation plans that reduce recidivism. Shotspotter also exhibited its gunshot detection solution, Shotspotter Flex, a gunfire alert system that provides critical information to give law enforcement agencies the detailed real-time data needed to investigate, analyze and prosecute gun-related crimes.

With innovation and collaboration at the heart of the conversations, Intel and Simularity presented an AWS powered solution that monitored the City of Austin’s air quality, identifying patterns that could be correlated to public health.

Opening up the conversation to civic-minded startups, the City of Austin hosted the Civic I/O Tech Pitch Competition. Mayors were excited to talk to these startups and learn more about how they can leverage civic technologies ranging from public safety to transportation improvements to communicating with their citizens. AWS sponsored and participated on the judging panel. The winners were:

1. RIDEALONG – a CJIS compliant first responder software that provides patrol officers key information about people with mental illness at the scene—everything from tailored de-escalation techniques to personalized service referral options.
2. RoadBotics – an application that collects and analyzes hazardous road conditions and notifies the presiding municipalities of roadway problems and anomalies.
3. SMARTER SORTING – contributing to a “zero waste economy,” smarter sorting uses technology to sort hazardous household waste, increasing waste diversion and reducing cost.

Between the startup pitched and the mayor’s garage, the conversations carried a common theme – what benefit does this bring my citizens?

Mayors are key to driving innovation in government. They want to be known for enacting change and driving improvements through technology. Government services are breaching the technology wave and driving citizen-engaged programs that improve the lives of the end user.

If you are looking for ideas on how to implement AWS cloud technology in your city, check out the City on a Cloud Innovation Map.  Also, remember to apply for a chance to win up to $50,000 in AWS credits.  The winners will be announced at our AWS Public Sector Summit in DC this June 12-14.

Cloud.gov, which runs on AWS GovCloud (US) and is built and maintained by GSA’s 18F, an office that helps other government agencies build, buy, and share technology products, recently received a Provisional Authority to Operate (P-ATO) at the moderate impact level from the FedRAMP Joint Authorization Board (JAB). It is now the first fully open source FedRAMP solution.

Cloud.gov’s mission is to provide a platform as a service for government teams, making it faster, simpler, and more secure. The 18F blog post states that, “cloud.gov is for teams that build and deliver websites (and other web-based applications) as part of their work — for example, an agency homepage, an open data API, or an internal information management tool. The agency’s development team sets up the application on cloud.gov, and cloud.gov handles the security, compliance, and maintenance of the underlying platform.”

With cloud.gov, government agencies can:

• Quickly deploy applications that comply with federal policies — without needing to manage infrastructure.
• Run scalable cloud-native applications. Since cloud.gov provides services on top of AWS, agencies can take advantage of AWS services, such as Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2).
• Try experiments: build and test prototypes without adding extra expense.
• Shorten the path to ATO (Authority to Operate) for each new or updated application. After an agency issues cloud.gov an ATO, only applications need to be evaluated for security and compliance.

With the recent FedRAMP announcement, now when agencies build a system on cloud.gov, their system or application inherits the FedRAMP compliance of the platform, which substantially reduces the amount of compliance work they need to do and accelerates the path to authorization. It handles many of the FedRAMP technical and compliance requirements of the underlying cloud platform, and allows agencies to focus on their web applications and code instead. Using AWS removes the necessity of the customer managing this infrastructure. Cloud.gov is an optimal solution for small to medium-sized agencies seeking a lower barrier to entry for cloud adoption, as well as larger agencies that require streamlined, rapid capability deployment for mission and enterprise applications.

Cloud.gov runs in the AWS GovCloud (US) region, which has a FedRAMP JAB P-ATO at the High impact level. AWS GovCloud (US) also offers support for other compliance needs, such as ITAR compliance, DOD SRG and CJIS. Learn more about AWS GovCloud (US) here.

Security is our number one priority, and at AWS, we have comprehensive security capabilities to protect virtually any workload. Through AWS Security services, we provide the opportunities to protect your data, monitor security-related activity, and receive automated responses. This gives our customers the ability to increase their security posture in the cloud, deliver more agile IT, and lower costs. With that in mind, here are six advantages of cloud security.

1. Integration of compliance and security – You can leverage AWS activity monitoring services to detect configuration change and security events, even integrating AWS activity with your existing monitoring solutions for simplified compliance reporting. We provide compliance reports based on managing thousands of security controls inherited through the AWS platform, making it easier and faster for you to meet security and compliance requirements.
2. Economies of scale apply – When organizations submit security requirements, we incorporate their feedback into the AWS security platform. All customers benefit from AWS security innovation and improvements made from customer feedback. Last year, we released hundreds of security and compliance related features and service enhancements.
3. Customer focus on systems and applications – The cloud reduces the total “security surface area” that customer security experts need to manage themselves. Our shared responsibility model allows you to focus your expertise on the higher level operating system and application security management. You retain control of what security you choose to implement to protect your own content, applications, systems and networks, no differently than you would for applications in an on-premises data center.
4. Visibility, homogeneity, and automation – With the cloud, you get to choose from a rich but more homogeneous set of infrastructure and capabilities. You can control down to the operating system image level what should be used in your environment. Using cloud orchestration capabilities like AWS CloudFormation, your security experts can validate a pre-defined configuration of systems and then those can be “stamped out” with all security features enabled and in place. For example, you can leverage AWS Quick Starts to automate the configuration of AWS resources to meet many compliance requirements.
5. Cloud platforms as “systems containers” – Cloud platforms are “systems containers” that surround traditional systems and provide more insight into their behavior and functioning, including security issues, providing a new kind of “defense in depth.” The “container” that runs your operating systems and applications is programmable, monitorable, and reactive software. For example, without knowing anything about the internal workings of your application, once you know its normal network behavior, you can set monitoring alarms at the infrastructure level that will trigger a smart response to any unusual activity.
6. Cloud, big data, security – With low-cost access to massive amounts of storage and processing capacity, our customers use the cloud to secure the cloud (they run big data analytics on security data and log data, which provides more insight into their security posture and results in a much faster remediation of issues). Leverage storage and processing power of the cloud to find the security event needles in the cloud haystack.

With the speed of innovation and increasing scale, the cloud story will only get better. AWS will continue to raise the bar in our efforts to provide our customers with an IT infrastructure and security services that deliver agility, visibility, scalability, and integrity. Our track record of operational integrity along with our rapid pace of innovation have gained the trust of government mission owners by delivering secure, agile, and cost-effective IT services.

Take the steps to deploy security-focused baseline environments on the AWS Cloud in this Quick Start demo. This Quick Start deploys a standardized environment that helps organizations with workloads that fall in scope for any of the following:

• National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) SP 800-53 (Revision 4)
• NIST SP 800-171
• The OMB Trusted Internet Connection (TIC) Initiative – FedRAMP Overlay (pilot)
• The DoD Cloud Computing Security Requirements Guide (SRG)

View this short demo and learn how to automate NIST and FedRAMP High compliance in just a few clicks. Let’s see how easy and quick it is to deploy a secure and compliant NIST environment.

1. Navigate to aws.amazon.com/quickstart and scroll down to the “Security & Compliance” section. Find the NIST and the NIST-High Quick Starts and then hit “View Guide.” The guide will provide what you need to know to deploy the NIST-compliant AWS architecture and links to the security control matrix, which describes how the environment meets NIST-control baselines.
2. Within the guide, scroll down and click on the “Launch Quick Start” if you want to launch it into a public AWS Region. Or, if you want to specifically launch it in AWS GovCloud (US), then click the link above. Within the demo, we will be launching it into a public AWS Region (AWS US-East)
3. Once you click on the “Launch Quick Start,” it will take you to the Cloud Formation console inside your AWS account. Hit the next button and it will load the Cloud Formation template, which will prompt you to fill in some parameters to customize this for your environment (Database password, Existing SSH Keys for your Instances, and the Availability Zones). After this, hit next. Take the defaults on the next screen and then hit next again. Acknowledge that “AWS CloudFormation might create IAM resources with custom names.” Hit create
4. At this point, an environment will be built for you in about 30 minutes. Once it is created, you will notice that all of the stacks are available to you. Then, you can go through the stacks and see how they were built and configured to your specification. To show that they are built correctly, there is a landing page that you can click within the application stack’s outputs.
5. Congratulations! You have successfully launched the Standardized Architecture for NIST 800-53 on the AWS Cloud Quick Start. Here you will find links to the security matrix and other artifacts that will help you document the system for your own authorizations.

That’s it for the demo! Watch the full video here.

Dcode42 and AWS join together – a guest blog by Meagan Metzger, Dcode42

Whether you know it or not, your life is impacted everyday by Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning. In fact, if you asked Alexa about the weather or traffic while enjoying your morning cup of coffee, you leveraged AI. This voice recognition is part of the growing field of technology that is changing the lives of consumers and our interaction with technology.

The government is no exception. AI is also becoming involved in every aspect of how our country runs—national security, economics, healthcare, and other domains. AI affords our government and nation opportunities to increase efficiency, make more intelligent decisions, and provide better services to citizens. As is usually the case, the issue in the public sector is adoption. Will this new technology be adopted in time to create the same benefit that the private sector will see or will the public sector take a wait and see approach that will limit how quickly and widely this new technology can be used?

Over the past six months, team members of Dcode42, a government technology accelerator program, worked closely with government leadership and large industry players to understand their biggest challenges. It quickly became clear that AI may be a critical solution to many agency challenges, but it is still uncharted territory for many agencies. In order to speed this adoption, Dcode42 and AWS are joining forces to address this challenge and drive AI companies and technology into government to solve real problems.

Accelerating AI and Machine Learning Adoption in Government

Dcode42 provides emerging technology companies with everything they need to succeed in the federal market through our comprehensive accelerator programs. We recently announced our newest cohort that focuses on delivering the most promising AI and machine learning tools to the government. This time, we are teaming with AWS because of the incredible tools, resources, networks, and insights AWS, both as a technology service and as a company, provide.

By bringing together Dcode42 and AWS, we offer a powerful launching pad for technology companies of all sizes to succeed quickly. Companies accepted into this three-month program receive concentrated guidance and support on crucial aspects of entering the federal market, including:

• Classes with renowned industry Subject Matter Experts on the inner workings of government – from marketing and sales to compliance, procurement, pricing and more;
• Exclusive briefings with key government buyers and industry leaders;
• Access to industry specialists and mentors for expert guidance and networking connections;
• Exposure to an extensive partner network of large and small partners to increase revenue opportunities; and
• Hands on strategic-planning and go-to-market support to maximize your resources.

Along with the robust programming that Dcode42 companies receive, this particular cohort will have the opportunity to work with AWS public sector teams to further speed their time to market. Companies leave the program with very tactical plans, close integration with AWS teams, and, in many cases, immediate opportunities for revenue.

Who Should Apply

The program has two tracks for companies of different sizes: the startups track, for companies with under $14M in revenue and/or funding, and the emerging growth track, for companies with $14-150M in revenue and/or funding. Our program is designed for two types of companies:

• Those with some traction in the federal market, but who are still in earlier stages of developing their government practice. These companies may have a few contracts or a dedicated federal team with prior experience.
• Companies completely new to the federal government looking to succeed more quickly who are not sure the best approach to take.

The deadline to apply for the upcoming cohort is April 3rd. Companies that wish to apply can visit www.dcode42.com/apply or find more information at www.dcode42.com/programs.