AWS Public Sector Blog

Category: Best Practices

tax forms with calculator on table top

Taxes, governments, and great experiences using the cloud

Information technology and cloud services can be enablers for modernization of these business processes and tax systems, and improved constituent experience. For public administrators, these tools can also shorten the window between the enactment of a new law and its timely and successful implementation. Here’s how governments are addressing some major challenges using the AWS Cloud.

Get help building your public sector business with APN Navigate

Now available for organizations and Amazon Web Services (AWS) Partners interested in expanding into the public sector: the APN Navigate Program. The APN Navigate Program expanded to offer dedicated tracks to help new and existing AWS Partners build a successful public sector practice. Called Public Sector Foundations, these tracks are open to all registered AWS Partners with the goal of helping them do business in the public sector and define their specialty to accelerate their route to market with AWS.

How to build secure data lakes to accelerate your nonprofit’s mission

Using data lakes, nonprofits can use data to influence strategy and inform decisions that produce value and impact. In this post, learn how to build a data lake, ingest data from a PostgreSQL server, give permissions to users to consume the data using AWS Lake Formation, and access and analyze the data using Amazon Athena.

How to accelerate CMMC compliance with the new AWS Compliant Framework

The AWS Compliant Framework is an automated solution designed to help customers reduce the time to setup an environment for running secure and scalable workloads while implementing an initial security baseline that meets US federal government standards. The solution was designed to address the requirements for deploying DoD CMMC and DoD Cloud Computing Security Requirements Guide compliant environments.

two students walking away from camera through a campus common area

Getting students back to the classroom and student athletes back on the field

According to a recent study conducted by the Institute of Education Sciences (IES), less than half of all US students are back in the classroom full time a full year after the start of the pandemic. As schools look to safely bring students back onsite the fall, with cloud technology, schools can manage their large populations through robust reporting of test results with meaningful statistics around clusters of students who live, learn and play together while meeting state reporting guidelines for point of care testing.

Business resiliency framework: 5 ways to simplify how governments digitally transform

The business resiliency framework uses the five most common business goals government and education organizations face: real-time data analytics, business continuity, process and systems modernization, workforce enablement and learning, and constituent engagement. Learn how public sector organizations can apply the business resiliency framework and cloud technology to close various workforce, data, and analytics gaps.

digital hand catching digital currency on blue background

Emerging economies will lead the charge for central bank digital currencies, say experts

China will launch its digital currency February 2022, and the UK and Eurozone have joined the movement for central bank digital currencies (CBDC), but it is the smaller, emerging economies that are leading the charge and have much to gain, experts have predicted. In a recent Global Government Forum and AWS Institute panel discussion, financial technology (FinTech) specialists noted it is the Bahamas and Cambodia who are the CBDC pioneers. The Bank for International Settlements said 86% of central banks are experimenting with CBDCs and 10% are close to implementing them, while banks representing 20% of the global population will launch a digital currency within three years.

city hall local government

Balanced budgets and enhanced constituent services: ERP beyond infrastructure in state and local governments

State and local governments (SLGs) are constantly looking for ways to improve the lives and well-being of their constituents. They strive for increased efficiencies in delivering existing government services or potential new services such as those related to assistance with food, health, education, affordable housing, weatherization, and more. Enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions, along with ancillary business systems that support performance-based budgeting, play a key role in providing data insights. The balancing act between tight budgets and enablement of government services is enabled by fiscal health, sound policies, and data insights. ERP systems deployed on the cloud can help with the capabilities and technology tools that governments need to derive efficiencies with existing services and deploy new services.

city traffic at night aerial

Advice for transportation agencies and authorities seeking funding for innovation

Innovators in the transportation sector can seek additional sources of funding to help advance projects to improve safety, efficiency, system performance, and infrastructure. The US Department of Transportation (USDOT) offers state and local government funding opportunities through discretionary grant programs that encourage transportation agencies to think big. Several AWS customers, including the Contra Costa Transportation Authority and the Washington Department of Transportation (WSDOT), successfully won these highly competitive USDOT grants. Learn from the collaborators on these projects, including Haile, Mark Haselkorn, director of the University of Washington’s Center for Collaborative Systems for Safety, Security, and Regional Resilience (CoSSaR), and Jimmy Kim, head of business development for smart communities, transportation, and mobility at Verizon, as they share their suggestions for crafting a successful application.

How the cloud is helping remove barriers to addressing climate change

What if we were to democratize access to data and compute so that anyone, anywhere in the world could contribute to climate science? The Amazon Sustainability Data Initiative (ASDI) seeks to accelerate sustainability research and innovation by minimizing the cost and time required to acquire and analyze large sustainability datasets. ASDI supports innovators and researchers with the data, tools, and technical expertise they need to advance sustainability initiatives. ASDI is committed to making climate-relevant data easier to access and analyze. ASDI’s growing data catalog comprises petabytes of open data.