Category: Government

Since signing a framework agreement with the Government of Canada (GC) in 2019, AWS has developed an open source solution to automate the deployment of security controls for GC customers, which can reduce the time it takes to achieve an Authority to Operate (ATO). Natural Resources Canada (NRCan) used this solution to implement their cloud landing zone controls aligned with the Protected B, Medium Integrity, Medium Availability (PBMM) profile. They worked with AWS Partner Kainos to complete an ATO evidence package in only 60 days—a process that typically takes 18 months.

In 2020, the City of Fort St. John in British Columbia began searching for innovative solutions to make life more simple for its young population. City staff wanted to better serve residents in ways that would suit their busy, digitally connected lifestyles. So the city worked with Cocoflo, a smart cities technology company, to implement a digital solution that could make municipal information and services more accessible through their SmartLiving portal—powered by AWS.

Edge computing moves data processing and analysis close to endpoints where data is generated to deliver real-time responsiveness, and reduces cost associated with transferring large amounts of data. Edge environments include Internet of Things (IoT) or mobile devices, sensors, video cameras, and other connected resources. With edge, the usual security principles still apply such as protecting data at rest and in motion, but new considerations emerge. Learn more in the new IDC whitepaper.

Customer experience (CX) has emerged as a key priority in the US following the 2021 Biden Administration Executive Order (EO) to transform federal customer experience and service delivery. Application modernization enables agencies to simplify business processes and provide customers with flexible, interactive, and simple to use applications, resulting in improved CX. In this blog post, we present an AWS architecture framework that agencies can use to develop and deploy a modern application that helps improve CX.

To mitigate synthetic fraud, government agencies should consider complementing their rules-based improper payment detection systems with machine learning (ML) techniques. By using ML on a large number of disparate but related data sources, including social media, agencies can formulate a more comprehensive risk score for each individual or transaction to help investigators identify improper payments efficiently. In this blog post, we provide a foundational reference architecture for an ML-powered improper payment detection solution using AWS ML services.

Recently, the National Science Foundation (NSF) announced a new funding opportunity for any principal investigator (PI) with an active award from the NSF Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE), for use of cloud services and technologies via CloudBank. PIs can submit requests for use of the AWS Cloud, on a rolling basis, with funding made available for the duration of one year. This is a first-of-its-kind opportunity for federally-funded researchers to explore the capabilities of the AWS Cloud, at no additional cost.

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.

This blog post explores the options US public sector customers and their business partners should evaluate when selecting an AWS partition. We discuss the differences between AWS GovCloud (US) and the AWS standard partition and how to decide which partition may be the best match for your organization’s security, compliance, and availability needs.

Increasingly, AWS customers are operating workloads both in AWS GovCloud (US) and standard AWS Regions. Dependencies between workloads, changing data controls, or enrichment of data across multiple data levels are examples of business needs that may require moving data in and out of AWS GovCloud (US). In this blog post, I explain how to move data between Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) buckets in the AWS GovCloud (US) and standard partitions.

As public sector customers find increasing need to move data between the AWS GovCloud (US) partition and the standard partition, they need tools to help them lower their operational burden. In this blog post, I walk through how to use AWS DataSync to move data on network file system (NFS) shares between the two partitions.