Category: Government

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.

May is Military Appreciation Month, providing an opportunity to recognize and show our appreciation for the US armed services and the important role they play in protecting and preserving our national security. The month includes celebrations and moments to recognize those in and out of uniform, as well as those that have and continue to serve. AWS is committed to supporting our veterans, active duty military, and military spouses. As we begin Military Appreciation Month, we are sharing progress made on our programs and efforts to support the military community.

In the past two years, many of us in Latin America have seen civil society, governments, academia, and the private sector unite to accelerate our ability to respond to the economic and human challenges of COVID-19. Public sector organizations innovated with the cloud to address a variety of dynamic needs: expanding financial inclusion, supporting wider access to education and healthcare, providing transparency in electoral processes, and more. In this blog post, we spotlight four organizations in Latin America that are using AWS to transform the public sector.

Since 1971, Canada Centre for Mapping and Earth Observation (CCMEO) at Natural Resources Canada (NRCan) has accumulated an Earth observation (EO) data archive in excess of two petabytes (PB). NRCan wanted to modernize its geospatial offerings at a faster pace, so they turned to the AWS Snow Family on AWS to migrate their large volume of data.

In a recent disaster response field testing exercise (FTX), the AWS Global Social Impact Solutions (GSI) team developed a prototype cloud architecture and tested it in a search and rescue (SAR) scenario simulating a missing responder crisis. This blog post walks through the SAR simulation and result, and provides an overview of the AWS services and technical architecture components the GSI team used to provide a hybrid edge/cloud COP solution that helped locate the missing team member in the simulated scenario within 20 minutes.

Before building in the cloud, government agencies need to determine how they want to allocate cloud costs in accordance with their jurisdictions’ transparency requirements and legislative oversight. A cloud cost allocation strategy–deciding how to distribute cloud costs to the users or beneficiaries of those incurred costs in a pre-defined way—is a foundational part of any agency’s cloud journey. Even though every organization’s cost allocation model may be unique, there are some common patterns, approaches, and best practices that you can leverage to design an effective strategy to meet your organization’s needs.

In this blog post, we explain how government agencies can accelerate their development workflows while maintaining strict application and operational security using the principles of continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) and DevSecOps. We provide a solution to walk you through how you can quickly set up your own DevSecOps pipeline that incorporates AWS and third-party security tools to give you a fast, flexible, and secure software delivery process.

The theme of this year’s Earth Day is “Invest in our planet.” In celebration of this year’s theme, we want to highlight the important sustainability work featured in the AWS documentary series, Climate Next, which explores the ways organizations and communities in four distinct regions are investing in cloud-powered solutions to fight climate change.

When I worked in the UK government, I led the Government Digital Transformation Service (GDS) Transformation Program, where we used an Agile approach to modernize a range of services, from social care benefits to prison visit booking. Now, I work with the AWS Institute executive education program to teach public sector leaders how to accelerate and expand their impact for citizens with digital transformation. In this blog post, I share my experience using the Agile approach to transform government services, and offer some best practices for organizations who want to adopt a bias for Agile action to deliver successful modernization faster and at scale.