Category: Defense

Friday, November 11 is Veterans Day in the United States. AWS thanks and honors active duty military and veterans today, and works to show our appreciation and commitment to the military community, veterans, and their spouses through our work year-round. From supporting veteran service organizations and nonprofits to providing training to active-duty and reservist service members, government civilians, transitioning veterans, and military spouses, AWS is dedicated to serving the military and veteran community. Learn more about the progress we’ve made on our ongoing efforts to support the military community throughout the year.

Whether on land, in air, or at sea, having connectivity and access to information in the field is critical for the US Department of Defense (DoD). Satellite communications systems provide the DoD with critical capabilities—from delivering satellite imagery to enabling communications—that support military users operating around the globe. Now, as part of a new DoD research and development effort, AWS and Amazon’s Project Kuiper will help shape the future of global, ubiquitous, and secure internet connectivity throughout the space domain for the United States and its allies.

Today, AWS announced the startups selected to participate in the first AWS Defence Accelerator. The 10 finalists brought forward innovative ideas that will help the defence industry enhance its abilities to uncover actionable intelligence to support defence decision making, defend against cyber threats, and support making the defence industry more environmentally sustainable.

AWS announced the availability of Wickr RAM (Recall, Alert and Messaging) to the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) through Cloud One, which is a cloud hosting infrastructure and service. Wickr RAM is an end-to-end encrypted full suite collaboration application built for the warfighter. It is available on AWS GovCloud (US) and can support workloads up to Impact Level 5.

In July 2021, the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) released a cloud native access point (CNAP) reference design that follows zero trust architecture (ZTA) principles and provides a new approach to access mission owner (MO) applications. The DoD’s reference design discusses four core capabilities of CNAP: authenticated and authorized entities (C1), authorized ingress (C2), authorized egress (C3), and security monitoring and compliance enforcement (C4). In this blog post, we walk through how to establish the C2 component via a virtual internet access point (vIAP) with AWS. The proposed architectures can reduce operational cost and management overhead, while improving the accessibility, resiliency, and security of mission owner applications.

In a data-dependent world, success belongs to the side with decision advantage: the ability to acquire data and make sense of a complex and adaptive environment, and act smarter and faster than the competition. Understanding global environments requires more than just more data – it requires live two- and three-dimensional maps, new support tools, improved processes, seamless connectivity, and better collaboration that can scale to the needs of the environment. This blog post explores how to address challenges of big data and accelerate time to data insights with machine learning with AWS Snowball Edge device deployment at the edge.

For countries like the UK, being at the forefront of innovation is vital to maintaining an agile, swift, and effective defence strategy. To support this need, AWS is launching its first Defence Accelerator for UK based startups, and startups from Europe, Middle East, and Africa (EMEA) doing business in the UK.

In 2020, the U.S. Army’s XVIII Airborne Corps embarked on a mission to become the Army’s data-centric Corps. Headquartered at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, the XVIII Airborne Corps—also known as the “America’s Contingency Corps” — is the Army’s strategic response force and is at the ready to deploy anywhere in the world to defend the US and its Allies. To enable their data ambitions, the XVIII Airborne Corps sought to establish the first enduring tactical cloud presence for the conventional Army and leveraged the AWS Cloud to support their journey.

The Uniformed Services University Health System (USUHS) is the nation’s federal health professions academy, offering a curriculum and educational experience that emphasizes military healthcare, leadership, readiness, and public health. Each year, USUHS holds a training exercise called Operation Gunpowder to help prepare third-year medical students for varying field-care challenges they may encounter during their service. Over the course of the eight weeks prior to the training exercise, AWS collaborated with Deloitte to deliver ancillary system and operational medicine telemedicine best practice training to the participating students. “This is the first time telemed has truly delivered,” reported attending experts in special operations medicine.

AWS is committed to supporting the mission of our Department of Defense (DoD) customers by providing innovative, efficient, and effective solutions. In support of this commitment, we are announcing the availability of DoD Cloud Infrastructure as Code (IaC) for AWS – a baseline that uses a collection of templates to enable defense mission owners to quickly build out secure, scalable cloud environments. DoD Cloud IaC for AWS is designed to help DoD organizations accelerate cloud adoption and support the rapid delivery of capabilities to the warfighter.