Category: Federal

Whether filing taxes, applying for student financial aid, seeking healthcare coverage, or receiving disaster support, every interaction with the federal government is an opportunity to strengthen the customer experience with rich citizen engagement and direct lines of feedback. But legacy technology, siloed data, lack of digital skills, and a one-size-fits-all design approach can limit the ability of government to meet the demands of their constituents. Using cloud technology and AWS can improve customer understanding, create personalized interactions, and modernize constituent experiences.

The AWS Summit Washington, DC is back, May 23-25 at Walter E. Washington Convention Center. With a focus on public sector customers and innovation, the AWS Summit Washington, DC is a three-day event with more than 300 breakout sessions, chalk talks, customer lightning talks, builders’ sessions, and more, to help you learn how to accelerate innovation and deliver on your mission. Learn how to digitally transform to meet your organization’s dynamic needs, using the cloud. Register today for the no-cost event and read on for more about this year’s event.

On April 1, the US National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) released the 1950 Census data to the general public. Census data is released 72 years after a census is conducted, and it has been 10 years since the last census data for the 1940 Census was publicly released. With the support of cloud technologies, this release marks a number of important firsts. AWS is honored to support the release of the 1950 Census and help make this data available to the public.

AWS signed a new Cloud Framework Agreement (CFA) with the Malaysian government, together with local IT provider and AWS Partner Radmik Solutions Sdn Bhd, to help accelerate cloud adoption in the public sector and help agencies save costs, boost digital skills, and drive innovation. AWS is the first international cloud service provider to have concluded and signed a CFA with the Malaysian government, as part of our long-term commitment to support Malaysia’s digital transformation.

Increased digitalization is transforming the payments landscape. Over 85 countries, representing over 90% of global GDP, are researching the possibility of launching a retail central bank digital currency (CBDC). However, as central banks evaluate the pros and cons of CBDCs, they are considering different approaches and designs to address the variety of needs and situations of each country. To advance understanding in this space, AWS worked with the Oliver Wyman Forum on a whitepaper which outlines a framework that can help support policymakers in evaluating the interdependencies between policy and technology choices. In this blog post, we summarize key principles outlined in the framework.

The AWS Secure Environment Accelerator (ASEA) landing zone helps customers deploy and operate a secure multi-account, multi-Region AWS environment. Governments in Canada and others around the world currently use the ASEA, with over 30 deployments to date. Some of these same customers also use VMware Cloud on AWS to integrate on-premises vSphere environments, allowing them to move existing workloads to the cloud more quickly. Integrating your VMware workload with natively managed AWS services can help you reduce your operational overhead and optimize your total cost of ownership (TCO). In this blog post, we review the technical considerations related to integrating your ASEA landing zone with your VMware Cloud on the AWS environment.

Governments are increasingly adopting digital ID systems to improve inclusion and accessibility to public services. Based on the experiences shared by governments and by AWS experts who have worked to implement digital ID around the world, six lessons emerge about how to create the right strategic mindset for digital ID creation and implementation.

Disaster recovery is a crucial investment for public sector organizations. However, out-of-date disaster recovery and business continuity planning (BCP) policies prevent organizations from improving in these essential areas—like the assumption that the more distance between data centers, the better. But is there a point where more distance between data centers has diminishing risk mitigation returns? Enter the Goldilocks zone for disaster recovery, in which the distance between data centers is not too close, not too far, but just right.

Government departments work hard to meet required security framework controls for cloud services, and obtaining an Authority to Operate (ATO) can sometimes take up to 18 months. To assist with this process, AWS developed the open-source AWS Secure Environment Accelerator (ASEA), a tool designed to help deploy and operate secure multi-account AWS environments. This post describes how government departments can more simply deploy a web application consisting of a single-page application (SPA), backend API, and database within ASEA.

This post aims to provide a summary of all the currently disclosed Apache Log4j issues as well as important resources that Amazon Web Services (AWS) has released to help our customers and partners limit any risks posed by these issues.