Category: government

With SXSW kicking off in Austin, we had the chance to speak with the City of Austin Mayor – Steve Adler – about the second annual Mayors Track and how technology helps Austin remain a wonderful place to live and visit.

Austin values diversity, creativity, the entrepreneurial spirit, the natural environment, and a laid back attitude. Adler has a goal to move the city forward in a way that is inclusive, innovative and intentionally improvisational. To move forward and handle the growth of the city, Mayor Adler relies on social innovation, social entrepreneurship, equity, and access.

Learn more about the City of Austin in the following Q&A.

What are some of your top memories from last year’s Mayors Track? Did you implement anything that you learned at the conference?

Last year, Austin and six other cities were named finalists for the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Smart City Challenge. The experience produced a public-private alliance in Austin that is working on using technology to reach underserved communities. Recently, Austin became one of five cities to win the Smart Cities Council Readiness Challenge Grant to develop affordable housing, improve mobility, and spark economic development for population groups that have traditionally been underserved.

Mayors are leading the way in innovation. How do you define innovation and how important is it to your overall charter to your constituents?

Innovation is just a new word for the way Austin has always done things. We like figuring out new ways of doing things and are good at change. Willie Nelson came here to retire, and he ended up not only revolutionizing country music, but the audience that listens to country music. Whole Foods revolutionized grocery stores. Alamo Drafthouse changed how we go to the movies. And SXSW changed, in the world’s best example of what Austin is, how we discover what is new in our culture.

What are two or three key takeaways that you hope the mayors bring back to their cities?

I hope other mayors take one thing back to their cities – innovation does not happen outside of government or in spite of government. We have to learn to adapt with our economies, and our economies have to learn how to adapt with us. In other words, we cannot disrupt each other and expect success. We must do this together.

Austin is known for their thriving startup community, what do you and/or the city do to encourage new businesses to set up shop in Austin?

We have a thriving startup community in Austin for reasons that go to the core character of this city. We love to change and improve things and support each other’s success. I cannot – and would not – change that. What I can do as mayor to support our tech community is to help our city government adapt to a changing economy and to do the basic blocking and tackling of government: work on transit and traffic congestion, make sure the roads are paved and the sidewalks are built, the trash is picked up, and affordable housing is built. Austin is a magical city, but we need to manage growth better to preserve the character of this city.

How is the City of Austin approaching data sharing or deriving insights from collaborating across departments?

We have a Chief Innovation Officer who is leading that mission and a Chief Equity Officer who makes sure everything we do is seen through the equity lens.

Have you considered how technology can and will play a role in creating healthier programs or services among your constituents?

Yes. In fact, we’re working with local leaders in the tech and healthcare fields to create a Healthcare Innovation Alliance to make sure underserved communities benefit from emerging technological innovations.

Thank you to Mayor Adler for your time and your hospitality in Austin! To learn more about how AWS helps local governments, click here. How are you investing in innovation? Tell us how your city is leveraging the AWS Cloud for a chance to win $50,000 in AWS credits.

The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) has issued Amazon Web Services (AWS) a Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA) High General Support System Authority to Operate (ATO) for AWS GovCloud (US), as well as a FISMA Moderate GSS ATO for the US East and West Regions.

This validation of a secure environment to run highly sensitive government workloads is important to the VA since they work with patient data, and protecting this data is critical to their mission to make a difference for Veterans. The FISMA High ATO for AWS GovCloud (US) will allow the VA to continue leveraging the cloud to enable their mission.

“We are honored to team with the VA on their journey to the cloud. VA’s decision to embrace cloud will have a positive, direct impact on our Veterans, as IT costs are reduced while functionality increases. We look forward to continuing this critical effort with the VA,” said Doug VanDyke, General Manager, Civilian Government & Nonprofits, Amazon Web Services Worldwide Public Sector.

Moving to the cloud brings many benefits to the VA including:

• Efficient and modern digital experiences
• Cost-savings by provisioning servers on-demand
• Rapid software and product development and deployment cycles
• Modern service-delivery capability
• Zero downtime maintenance windows
• Increased operational flexibility
• Faster identification and resolution of security issues

In addition to a FISMA High General Support System ATO from the VA, AWS GovCloud (US) has also received a P-ATO from the Joint Authorization Board (JAB) under the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) High baseline. And recently, the Region received a JAB-issued FedRAMP High P-ATO for three new services: Amazon RDS for MySQL, Oracle, and PostgresSQL, Amazon CloudWatch Logs, and AWS CloudTrail.

Motivated on behalf of their citizens, mayors across the country are looking to be more agile and continue to innovate to make cities smart, connected, and sustainable. In many ways, mayors look to solve problems and overcome challenges through the use of new technologies, like connected intersections, gunshot detection, water quality monitoring, and energy management.

To fuel innovation and conversation about how technology can help cities, the City of Austin is hosting the United States Conference of Mayors Track as part of the SXSW conference in Austin, TX on March 10-13th. AWS will be the premier sponsor of the track.

This year’s dialogue will be focused on how technology and policy are improving quality of life for citizens around the country. Key themes include: technology, tech policy and governance, entrepreneurship and economic development, constituent relations and engagement, and public sector innovation.

From mobility to the Internet of Things (IoT), take a look back on what we heard from local governments during last year’s track about what matters most to them to continue to innovate for the benefit of their citizens.

This week, mayors will have the opportunity to once again hear from other mayors working through the same challenges and driving toward similar missions.

2017 Highlights for Mayors

Partner Demo Day – At the partner demo day, AWS partner, Intel, will show an air quality sensor and monitoring system that works on vehicles and measures air pollution. Intel is leveraging the AWS Internet of Things (IoT) Service and will be sharing best practices for sensor technology and data collection leveraging the AWS Cloud.

Civic.IO Mayors Matchup – AWS is also sponsoring the Civic.IO Mayors Matchup competition on the morning of Sunday, March 12th. Come hear from civic tech startups who will pitch their technologies to the mayors for a chance to win up to $20,000 and the opportunity to implement their technology in one of the mayors cities.

City on a Cloud Innovation Challenge – To learn more about how local and regional governments are innovating on behalf of their citizens around the globe, check out our City on a Cloud Innovation Challenge. Apply today for a chance to earn up to $50,000 in AWS promotional credits. Winners will be announced at the AWS Public Sector Summit June 12-14, 2017, in Washington, DC.

Stay Connected

Watch for more information here on the blog, follow our periscope series on @AWS_Gov, as well as our interview with City of Austin’s Mayor Adler on our Facebook Live.

AWS has signed Memorandums of Understanding with the governments of Honduras and Chile with the mission to work closely with the administrations, local universities, nonprofit organizations, associated agencies, and community leaders to modernize government services within the countries.

“Latin American governments continue to rapidly adopt AWS cloud services for the benefit of their citizens. Honduras and Chile are leaders in publicly adopting the latest technology, government cloud-first policies, and security standards for economic growth,” said Jeff Kratz, Director, Worldwide Public Sector for Latin America, Canada and the Caribbean, Amazon Web Services. “Strong engagement with our local partner communities, US Embassy teams, and NGOs will accelerate success for a better, safer Latin America.”

We are committed to preparing future generations for a competitive global economy and fostering intellectual development of new startups, while enabling economic growth and protecting its citizens in a connected world.

This signing and the rolling action plans for Chile and Honduras focus on three core goals:

1. Modernization of government systems and citizen services for a more connected, secure government. While assisting in many open data initiates to provide citizen transparency and visibility as well as modernization of various internal systems for a more efficient government, we look forward to bringing global security best practices to Chile and Honduras to help ensure a brighter, safer tomorrow.
2. Engaging many public and private universities with our AWS Educate Program to build the skills of future generations for success in a global economy. The AWS Educate program will ensure putting the right resources, curriculum, cloud credits and more in the hands of students and teachers, not only inspiring new innovation, but reinforcing science, technology, engineering, and mathematical skill development.
3. We will continue to foster a strong, vibrant, and world-class technology startup community. Through workshops, training, and programs such as AWS Activate which provides resources to new startups, we look forward to not only assisting customers to bring their new ideas to market, but also helping them sell these on a global marketplace through the AWS Marketplace.

We thank the Administrations of Chile and Honduras for their engagement and we look forward to working together on this next step in innovating for our customers in Latin America.

AWS firma un Protocolo de Acuerdo con los Gobiernos de Chile y Honduras

AWS ha firmado un Protocolo de Acuerdo con los gobiernos de Chile y Honduras, con la misión de trabajar de cerca con las administraciones, las universidades locales, las organizaciones sin ánimo de lucro, las agencias asociadas y los líderes comunitarios para modernizar los servicios gubernamentales dentro de los países.

“Los gobiernos de América Latina continúan adoptando rápidamente los servicios en la nube de AWS para el beneficio de sus ciudadanos. Honduras y Chile son líderes en la adopción pública de las tecnologías más actuales, con políticas gubernamentales de priorización para la nube y estándares de seguridad para el crecimiento económico”, dijo Jeff Kratz, Director del Sector Publico Global para Latinamerica, Canada y el Caribe de Amazon Web Services. “Un fuerte compromiso con nuestros socios locales, los equipos de las embajadas de Estados Unidos y las ONGs acelerarán el éxito de una América Latina mejor y más segura”.

Estamos comprometidos a preparar a las generaciones futuras para una economía global competitiva y guiar el desarrollo intelectual de las nuevas start-ups, mientras que se posibilita el crecimiento económico y se protege a los ciudadanos en un mundo conectado.

Esta firma y los planes de acción continuados para Chile y Honduras se centran en tres objetivos esenciales.

1. Modernización de los sistemas de los gobiernos y los servicios a los ciudadanos para un gobierno más seguro y conectado. Mientras se asiste en varias iniciativas de Datos Abiertos para proveer a los ciudadanos de transparencia y visibilidad, además de modernización de varios sistemas internos para un gobierno más eficiente, esperamos traer mejores prácticas en seguridad global a Chile y Honduras para ayudarles a asegurar un mañana mejor y más seguro.
2. Involucrar muchas universidades públicas y privadas con nuestro Programa AWS Educate con el objetivo de construir talento para el éxito de las nuevas generaciones en la economía global. El Programa AWS Educate se asegurará de proveer los recursos apropiados, el currículum, los créditos de la nube y más en manos de estudiantes y profesorado, no sólo inspirando la innovación, sino reforzando la ciencia, la tecnología, la ingeniería y el desarrollo de habilidades matemáticas.
3. Vamos a continuar fomentando las comunidades de startups tecnológicas fuertes, dinámicas y de talla mundial. A través de talleres, formación y programas como AWS Activate, que aporta recursos a nuevas startups, esperamos no sólo asistir a los clientes a llevar ideas nuevas al mercado, sino también ayudarles a venderlas en un mercado global a través de AWS Marketplace.

Agradecemos a las Administraciones de Chile y de Honduras por el compromiso y estamos deseando trabajar juntos en este nuevo paso innovando para nuestros clientes en América Latina.

AWS launched the fourth City on a Cloud Innovation Challenge, a global program recognizing how local and regional governments are innovating on behalf of their citizens around the globe. New to the competition this year, we are opening the competition to school districts who are using the cloud to enrich learning, help teachers reach more students, and improve school or district operations.

“Through the City on a Cloud Innovation Challenge, we’ve watched our customers take action on an idea, grow a program to better serve their citizens, and raise the bar on what is possible when they dream big,” said Teresa Carlson, VP of Worldwide Public Sector, Amazon Web Services. “This year, we are excited to add school districts to the challenge, as we’ve seen some innovative uses of the cloud and want to recognize these pioneers around the world.”

Governments and school districts can now compete in three award categories:

• Best Practices: This award category will recognize governments and school districts leveraging the AWS Cloud to implement a program or service on behalf of their citizens or students.
• Partners in Innovation: This award category will recognize technology partners implementing a program or service on behalf of a government or school district.
• Dream Big: This award category provides cloud credits to help governments and school districts implement big ideas through technology.

Winners will receive up to $50,000 in AWS promotional credits to help achieve their mission with the cloud. Click here to apply today (the nomination takes around five minutes)! The City on a Cloud Innovation Challenge closes on Friday, May 12th.

Governments and schools from around the world are investing in innovation and using the AWS Cloud, like the City of Chicago (2015 Dream Big Award Winner), which uses an open-source platform to provide real-time weather, road closures, transit data, residential complaints, and other information in the area so people can plan accordingly.

Another winner is the New York Public Library (2016 Best Practices winner), which makes available 677,496 items spanning a wide range of eras, geography, and media, drawings, manuscripts, maps, photographs, rare books, videos, audio, and more. Encompassing the subject strengths of the vast collections of NYPL, these materials represent the applied sciences, fine and decorative arts, history, performing arts, and social sciences.

Since launching the City on a Cloud Innovation Challenge in 2014, we received several applications focused on bringing the Internet of Things into cities, many of which are leveraging or plan to leverage the AWS – Intel IoT Platform. This joint platform allows customers to derive insights from their existing data by deploying Intel IoT Gateways along with an ecosystem of compatible sensors and devices. These hardware devices include software built with the AWS IoT Device SDK to connect them to AWS IoT and, ultimately, AWS endpoints. From there, customers can build software to connect devices from their cities and school districts to AWS services and gain value through IoT data analytics.

If you have an idea that you want to showcase and expand or make a reality – apply now!

This year’s winners will be announced at the AWS Public Sector Summit in Washington, DC June 12-14, 2017. Learn more about past winners by visiting our City on a Cloud Innovation Map.

So what would you do with $50,000 in AWS promotional credits? Tell us how for a chance to win and help your city or school become smart, connected, and sustainable with AWS.

Get ideas and learn more about the challenge and watch the 2016 video here.

AWS has joined the Commonwealth of Virginia and Virginia Tech to support the Cyber Range initiative with scalable cloud infrastructure and to collaborate on cybersecurity educational efforts, enabling the Cyber Range with both content and a closed network for hands-on exercises, competitions, and other simulations.

“We are thrilled to be a part of this important initiative in Virginia, which is one we hope will spark similar programs across the country,” said Teresa Carlson, Vice President of Worldwide Public Sector for AWS. “It’s critical that we have a skilled cybersecurity workforce to meet the growing demands of the field. Security is ‘job zero’ for us at AWS, and we are excited to help inspire the next generation of cyber experts.”

Investments and public-private partnerships to train a cyber workforce with technology like the AWS Cloud can help better equip the next generation of cyber experts. By using AWS, the virtual facility will be well positioned to provide Virginia educators access to cybersecurity courseware, as well as a hands-on laboratory environment for students.

At the Commonwealth’s inaugural Cyber Fusion event and Virginia Cyber Cup Challenge on February 24-25 at Virginia Military Institute, Teresa joined a panel on the challenges and opportunities confronting the United States government, economy, and society in cyberspace and shared AWS’s commitment to growing the cyber and cloud-enabled workforce. See photos from the event below.

One way that we are doing this is through our global AWS Educate Program, which provides an academic gateway for the next generation of IT professionals. Through AWS, universities around the world access curriculum grants and learning content that give their students access to cloud technology. This means that new college grads can learn how to work with cloud computing before they graduate from college.

In addition to training the next-generation of cyber professionals, we provide government and our other customers with the most powerful, flexible, and affordable tools and capabilities to build secure systems. The AWS Cloud infrastructure has been architected to be one of the most flexible and secure cloud computing environments available today. AWS customers inherit all the best practices of AWS policies, architecture, and operational processes built to satisfy the requirements of our most security sensitive customers. We provide a wide variety of best practices documents, encryption tools, and other guidance our customers can leverage in delivering application-level security measures. AWS partners also offer hundreds of tools and features to help customers to meet their security objectives, ranging from network security, configuration management, access control, and data encryption.

Through relationships and programs like the Cyber Range, we are working to fill the cyber knowledge gap, improve hiring practices, and ultimately build a trusted workforce of capable cyber employees.

Future Cities Catapult (FCC) has simplified the “smart city” concept into five imperatives to help get you started on your digital journey to citizen innovation.  Following the AWS UK Region Launch, we have collaborated with Future Cities Catapult to bring you the Future Citizen Innovation Series.

In January in London, we hosted the first week of sessions featuring Transport for London (TfL), The Met Office, Zaizi, KainosEvolve, DVLA and Future Cities Catapult talking about the Future of Citizen Innovation, Open Data, NHS, and how our customers are using the AWS Cloud to innovate today. Watch some of the event highlights in this video.

For our second week of this event series, we will focus on Smart Cities highlighting lessons learned from key city leaders. From 6 – 10 March, 2017, you can learn what makes a smart city “smart.” We distilled the topic into five imperatives to bring your Smart City project from an idea to a reality.

1. Integrated City Services – March 6th, featuring the London Borough of Kingston Transformation Programme
2. Dynamic Urban Planning – March 7th, featuring Urban Growth Planner by Future Cities Catapult
3. Citizen Led Innovation – March 8th, featuring City of Bournemouth – the UK’s fastest growing digital economy
4. Consistent Small and Medium Enterprise (SME) Engagement – March 9th, featuring Belfast
5. Resilience & Sustainability – March 10th, featuring David Wilde – Executive Director, Exeter County Council

Learn more and register now for the Future Citizen Innovation Series. We will also work to get you equipped with technology and practical steps to implementation. There are ten “ASK AWS Architect” sessions available on a first-come, first-served basis throughout the week. Please indicate your interest on the registration form to book your one-on-one time with AWS experts.

• Check out the full agenda here
• Share it with your colleagues in Urban Planning, IT, Customer Service, and other departments to get multiple stakeholders onboard
• Secure your place, as there are only 10 places left!

Check out some of the photos from the first week below.

Smart cities around the world are collecting and using data to make decisions in real or near real-time to better serve citizens, protect our environment, and lower costs. For example, smart technology is helping to lower congestion in streets, reduce pollution by optimizing transportation infrastructure, lower energy consumption by employing real-time analysis sensors to optimize just-in-time or incident-based illumination, and providing faster response to public safety incidents via real-time capture and analysis of sensor and surveillance data. These cities are transforming operations and services through their smart use of Internet of Things (IoT) solutions.

Most smart city solutions rely on a combination of core technologies (compute, storage, databases, and data warehouses) and advanced technologies (big data analytics, machine learning, IoT, and ingesting streaming data). The cloud allows cities to create new services with the goal of making citizen’s lives better while optimizing resources.

Important examples of smart city solutions built on AWS include:

• The New York City Department of Transportation’s mission is to improve the safety of New Yorkers by enhancing the city’s transportation infrastructure. To support the city’s Vision Zero traffic and pedestrian safety initiative, the NYDOT built web applications Vision Zero View and iRide NYC on the cloud. Vision Zero View uses crowdsourcing to collect traffic safety data, which can be used to redesign streets and traffic patterns with the goal of reducing traffic fatalities to zero in New York City.
• The Land Transport Authority (LTA) of Singapore is a government agency responsible for all land transport development, policies, and enforcement, and is key to the economic development of Singapore. Transporting over 2.2 million users a day, the LTA has touchpoints generating public feedback that required quick response time, which led LTA to consider the cloud. AWS provided a more cost-effective solution with a faster roll out time and a disaster recovery solution. LTA began using AWS for web hosting instead of building their own datacenter and experienced a 60% cost savings when compared to an on-premises infrastructure with the security posture required for a government agency.
• Peterborough City Council (PCC) is a council charged with governing the City of Peterborough, a leading UK Digital City. Integrating data from weather stations, smart energy meters, IoT devices installed in people’s homes, and automated libraries with the council’s core applications and datasets, PCC aims to run the city in a revolutionary new way. Arcus Global recommended AWS to be the sole provider of the infrastructure for the project due to its innovation, elasticity, and breadth of services. The AWS deployment acts as a hub for all legacy applications, integration to smart city IoT devices, analytics, and SaaS applications.
• The ‘Smart Airport Experience’ project was funded by the government-run Technology Strategy Board in the UK and implemented at London City Airport, working with a technology team led by Living PlanIT. The goal of the project was to demonstrate how IoT technologies could be used to both enhance customer experiences and improve operational efficiency at a popular business airport, which already offers fast check-in. The project used the Living PlanIT Urban Operating System (UOS™) hosted in an AWS environment as the backbone for real-time data collection, processing, analytics, marshalling, and event management to help travelers navigate checkpoints, purchase meals, and get to their gates as efficiently as possible.
• Transport for London (TfL) is London’s integrated transport authority responsible for all forms of transport, including Tube, buses, roads, trams, river, DLR, above ground, cycling, walking, coaches, freight, taxis and more. TfL is responsible for approximately 24 million journeys a day on their network. Through open data and cloud technology, TfL was able to deliver new services to an increasing population, which led to improvements in reliability, customer experience, and significant cost savings. To learn more, click here.
• Leveraging AWS infrastructure, the City of Chicago was able to launch OpenGrid, a real-time, open source situational awareness program intended to improve the quality of life for citizens and improve efficiency of city operations. OpenGrid allows the public to interact with the data in order to see the information about the city related to business license filings, traffic and weather concerns, and emergency response calls via 311. With AWS, the City of Chicago has the flexibility and agility to deliver better citizen services in Chicago. In addition, Chicago placed the open source code for the platform on AWS allowing other cities to create similar programs.
• PetaJakarta is an applied research project originally supported by the University of Wollongong’s Global Challenges Program and a Twitter data grant. It brings together mobile mapping and local flood information for the city of Jakarta, Indonesia. The platform lets the 28 million citizens of Jakarta share real-time flood information in a part of the world increasingly affected by flooding. In addition to the collection and dissemination of information by community members through location-enabled mobile devices, researchers can complement existing manual water gauges with water-level-sensing devices to inexpensively increase monitoring across the waterway network in Jakarta. The PetaJakarta team is now based at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and is preparing for the launch of PetaBencana.id, which will serve more cities, have a wider social media reach, pull from additional data sources, and utilize a new architecture.

Learn how you can make your city a smart city with AWS here.

Check back on the blog as we will be sharing a follow-up post with a deep dive into the AWS services for smart cities.

We are already looking forward to our eighth annual AWS Public Sector Summit in Washington, DC. This year’s event will take place June 12-14, 2017 at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center. Registration will be open soon, so stay tuned for more information on how to save your spot.

As we begin the countdown to the Summit, we wanted to give you a glimpse into what you can expect this June.

What to Expect in 2017

• Over 100+ breakout sessions on topics, such as DevOps, Big Data, Internet of Things, security and compliance, adoption models, scientific computing, open data, and more.
• Two keynotes with a star line up of CIOs. View some of the keynote videos from the 2016 event.
• Direct access to AWS technologists
• Pre-Day with bootcamps and deep dive workshops
• Networking opportunities with partners and peers

Mark your Calendar

Mark your calendar for one of the largest gatherings of public sector technology leaders in 2017. More details below!

Date: June 12-14, 2017

Location: Walter E. Washington Convention Center – 801 Mt Vernon Pl NW, Washington, DC 20001

Prepare for everything. That is the guidance that MD5, a public-private partnership between the National Defense University, New York University, and a network of national research universities, is giving its participants for the MD5 Hackathon on February 24 – 26 in Austin, Texas. The three day hackathon brings together over 100 innovators from the Department of Defense (DoD), UT Austin, and the Austin community to tackle some of the toughest Humanitarian Assistance and Disaster Relief (HADR) challenges. We are looking forward to being the technology provider, working with MD5 to provide access to AWS technologies and mentorship throughout the hackathon. Join us by registering today!

Established in 2015 and based at Fort McNair in Washington, DC, MD5 seeks to reinvigorate civil-military technology collaboration and value creation through the development of a National Security Innovation Corps – entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs solving high tech problems in the interest of national security.

MD5 works to enable communities of innovators, following a model of innovation marked by “a compulsive interest in technically elegant problems, an almost childlike fascination for new things, and, of course, a patriotic commitment to national defense,” outlined by Merritt Roe Smith, MIT professor and technology historian.

MD5’s hackathon is an example of commercializing technology relevant to the nation’s security and prosperity. They are seeking hardware and software concepts that addresses humanitarian assistance and disaster relief challenges in the following areas:

• Logistics and Planning
• Communications
• Water and Power

AWS is committed to enabling innovators and providing solutions to the Department of Defense (DoD) and commercial collaborators for these disaster situations, whether a man-made, natural, or cyber.

For example, what do you do if you cannot get online? What do you do if you have no power? AWS Snowball Edge and AWS Internet of Things (IoT) integrations are able to seamlessly support edge workloads or communicate with other devices securely – even when not connected to the Internet.

We will be on hand at the Hackathon to answer technical questions over the three days and help find ways AWS services can assist in using data to help save lives. Learn more about AWS for Defense.

Register today!