Category: Government

In early 2020, the Norton Police Department’s (NPD) on-premises, legacy system, failed them for the last time. Lifesaving services were down. To revive them, NPD made the decision to go live on AWS Partner SOMA Global’s public safety platform—six months ahead of the scheduled cutover date. Despite the early deployment, the SOMA platform exceeded expectations, making sure critical emergency call-taking and dispatching continued. Using SOMA also helped NPD cut costs and save time. Read on to learn how the NPD found a successful partnership with SOMA Global in their time of need.

Beginning on April 1, 2023, state Medicaid agencies (SMA) will have one year to “unwind” temporary COVID-era changes and return to pre-pandemic ways of working. A major part of that will be re-verifying that all 91 million members still qualify to receive Medicaid benefits. For nearly a year, AWS has supported SMAs with in-house Medicaid expertise to identify unwinding issues and develop solutions to address them. The top four concerns that SMAs have shared are in approaching outreach and engagement, staffing shortages, returned mail, and reporting capabilities. Learn how AWS can help states across the country overcome these challenges across different scenarios.

AWS is helping the 911 community mitigate the impact of staffing shortages on call wait times by providing 911 centers the means to automate the receipt and resolution of designated non-emergency calls. Learn how the Jefferson County Communications Center Authority is already seeing improvements using an AWS solution, and discover the solution’s components that support 911 centers in handling non-emergency calls at scale.

On September 28, 2022, Hurricane Ian made landfall in Southwest Florida. At the request of standby organizations Help.NGO and Information Technology Disaster Resource Center (ITDRC), the AWS Disaster Preparedness and Response team assisted with response operations across a variety of functions in the aftermath of Hurricane Ian.

The AWS Sustainability Conference held in Dublin gathered public sector and commercial organisations to came together to better understand how the AWS Cloud can drive sustainability initiatives. The conference focused on the importance of sustainability in business strategy, and how organisations can leverage the power of technology to achieve their sustainability goals. Leaders at the AWS Sustainability Conference discussed key best practices to optimize for sustainability initiatives.

A new geopolitical and energy market reality has accelerated momentum for the green transition. But there is one geography for which energy is a perennial challenge: islands. Islands have always sought to create a sustainable environment for their populations and have had to use ingenuity, collaboration, and civic will to make it happen—and often by using innovative technology. In this way, islands can be viewed as living laboratories of what could be scaled up for mainland communities. As the world responds to the energy crisis, islands can show a path for overcoming energy challenges.

AWS announced AWS Modular Data Center. This new service provides U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) customers with the ability to deploy compute and storage capabilities to support large-scale workloads wherever they need it, including in Disconnected, Disrupted, Intermittent, or Limited (DDIL) environments. Instead of relying on limited data center infrastructure or building from the ground up, this offering delivers a cost-effective, self-contained modular data center solution that supports customers’ data center scale workloads.

A key focus for the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and state Medicaid agencies is making sure those eligible for Medicaid maintain coverage and supporting transition to alternatives. Medicaid agencies need to conduct outreach to make their millions of members aware of the process for redetermination. With cloud-based tools from AWS, state agencies can conduct this outreach using no code/low code, serverless, elastic services that can scale to two billion text messages a day. In this blog post, learn how to set up a multi-lingual, interactive SMS message campaign that can automatically verify and update member information on file based on member responses.

Many public sector organizations that are moving to the cloud often misunderstand that the architecture of AWS Regions and Availability Zones fundamentally changes how they should think about disaster recovery and resiliency. In this blog post, I share some best practices to answer common questions about building highly available workloads, and share some ways to consider high availability, disaster recovery, and application resiliency within AWS.

Data collection and safety reporting are top priorities for natural gas companies, and the largest municipally-owned natural gas utility in the United States is no exception. For years, plant operators captured readings on paper forms every hour from various systems, including temperature, pressure, volume, and flow. This gas utility’s management team realized that manual, paper-based daily reporting was both time-consuming and unreliable from a data reporting perspective, and decided to turn to the cloud. Learn how they use AWS-powered solutions from AWS Partner KloudGin to optimize and digitize their workforce.