Category: Thought Leadership

AWS is committed to helping our customers address the challenges brought about by COVID-19. In the months since the pandemic started, we have helped governments and organizations around the world accelerate efforts to track the virus, understand its outbreak, and better contain its spread. These are principles that have been reinforced by the World Health Organization (WHO). With the number of worldwide cases continuing to rise at an alarming rate, there is a global imperative to discover, test, and isolate patients in order to slow the viral spread, save lives, and fully reopen economies. To meet this public health imperative, governments are expanding their use of a well-established technique called ‘contact tracing’.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) Partner Network (APN) Public Sector Partners leaned into innovation and customer obsession to deliver amazing results, especially in the time of COVID-19. In light of these significant contributions, we are excited to announce the winners of the 2020 AWS Public Sector Partners Awards. Read more about our winners.

The rapid acceleration of digital transformation has raised expectations for efficient and effective engagement with service providers. Many expect the same engagement with government agencies as they do from consumer services such as video-on-demand, ecommerce, and online food delivery. In Australia, the government is prioritising delivering services through technology in a fast and secure way. The CSCP was closed in March 2020 and the ISM was updated to remove the requirement to select services from the Certified Cloud Services List (CCSL). However, the discontinuation of the CSCP does not alter Amazon Web Services (AWS) commitment to help Australian Government agencies innovate rapidly and securely.

Over the past decade, cloud technology has been the driver of digital transformation, allowing organizations to operate with greater efficiency—and more importantly, innovate at speed. But as institutions of every size and type have discovered, keeping up with the pace of technological change can be difficult. The key hurdle? Skills.

Research is done differently in the cloud than in an on-premises lab. Research labs looking to move computational research to the cloud should start with their workflows. There are common themes across computational research workflows that researchers should consider as they begin to move their research workflows to AWS.

Government agencies have accelerated their transition to the cloud over the last few years, and COVID-19 has accelerated the urgency and pace of that move. A benefit of moving to the cloud is increased security. But to realize this, new infrastructure must be implemented and managed correctly, using best practices and the right technologies. Working with our partners, AWS has helped dozens of solutions accelerate their FedRAMP authorizations. There are more than 100 FedRAMP-authorized solutions running on AWS.

The fifth and final episode of the Mission Critical Cloud Fix This podcast is now live. We spoke with three healthcare customers—University of California San Diego Health (USCD), Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2), and MedStar Health—to learn more about how the cloud helps power modern healthcare. You can stream all episodes on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Stitcher, TuneIn, Overcast, iHeartRadio, and via RSS.

Later this year, the Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification (CMMC) accreditation framework will take effect, impacting U.S. DoD contractors, supply chain, solution providers, and systems integrators. The DoD estimates that more than 300,000 organizations will require certification. In addition, other U.S. federal agencies and international organizations may adopt a similar framework to protect their intellectual property (IP). No matter the size of your organization, cloud-based services can help you meet the requirements of CMMC.

The fourth episode of the Mission Critical Cloud Fix This podcast mini-series by Teresa Carlson, vice president of the worldwide public sector at Amazon Web Services (AWS), is now live. We dove into how two federal government customers—the Smithsonian Institution and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Goddard Space Flight Center—use the cloud to reduce operational costs and find new ways to deliver on their missions.

The COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated that public sector organizations need modern infrastructure, capabilities and controls to overcome the disruption caused by global health outbreaks. Organizations that embraced cloud services proved more responsive. They were able to continue operating remotely and serving their customers and citizens, demonstrating agility, scalability, and speed. In How Governments Can Build Resilience in a New Normal: Emerging Practices from Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, a new policy paper from the AWS Institute, we outline how organizations can use the cloud to recover from the disruption that the virus brought, as well as become more resilient for future challenges.