Category: Government

In this challenging job market, many Texans who lost their jobs to COVID-19 lack the skills to quickly reenter the workforce to secure employment with employers with open roles. With support from the Texas State Legislature, the Texas Association of Community Colleges (TACC) and AWS announced a statewide collaboration committed to equipping Texas community colleges with professional development, technical training, and certification exams for those educators, instructors, and faculty who will begin implementing the AWS Academy program starting next fall.

To protect citizens and save lives, justice and public safety agencies rely on timely access to critical information, such as criminal histories, arrest warrants, stolen vehicles, and 911 call data. Providing this mission critical criminal justice information with five nines (99.999%) availability and protecting it according to the rigorous security requirements prescribed in the Criminal Justice Information Services Security Policy are top priorities for criminal justice agencies (CJA). AWS’s innovative features and security controls can help customers achieve CJIS compliance in a simplified way.

Cloud Innovation Centers (CICs) powered by Amazon Web Services (AWS) aim to empower public sector organizations to quickly create and test new ideas using Amazon’s innovation methodology. With the CIC program, students and researchers, along with AWS teams, focus on solving real-life societal challenges facing the public sector. Learn more about some of the digital solutions on challenges the CIC team published over the last quarter such as working to prevent opioid overdose, discovering new coronaviruses, and using machine learning to monitor beehive health.

In state and local government transportation, infrastructure owners like departments of transportation, traffic agencies, tolling authorities, public transit agencies, airports, and seaports, all strive to operate more efficiently. They’re working to deliver safe, dependable, and equitable transportation experiences to citizens, regardless of how, when, or where they travel. Forward thinking public agencies are turning to a new breed of solutions provider—one not tied to a legacy framework that cannot address current traveler needs. They work with system integrators, independent software vendors, and consultants to innovate using AWS to improve traffic safety, construction project management, analytics and reporting, and secure identification.

China will launch its digital currency February 2022, and the UK and Eurozone have joined the movement for central bank digital currencies (CBDC), but it is the smaller, emerging economies that are leading the charge and have much to gain, experts have predicted. In a recent Global Government Forum and AWS Institute panel discussion, financial technology (FinTech) specialists noted it is the Bahamas and Cambodia who are the CBDC pioneers. The Bank for International Settlements said 86% of central banks are experimenting with CBDCs and 10% are close to implementing them, while banks representing 20% of the global population will launch a digital currency within three years.

AWS recently participated in a technical demonstration, known as “On-Ramp 4,” to test edge computing capabilities for the Air Force’s Advanced Battle Management System (ABMS). ABMS is the Air Force’s contribution to the DoD’s Joint All Domain Command and Control (JADC2) vision. Under a Cooperative Research and Development Agreement (CRADA) with ABMS, AWS tested the ability to successfully integrate and deploy a tactical edge node solution leveraging highly resilient network connectivity and communications.

In 2021, one in six Australians—almost four million people—have hearing loss, ranging from mild to profound. The statistic is part of the larger global picture reported by the World Health Organization (WHO) that approximately 466 million people live with hearing loss; of these, 34 million are children. In addition, 1.1 billion young people are at risk of hearing loss due to exposure to noise in recreational settings and through personal audio devices. AWS offers services that will help organizations build end-to-end solutions with accessibility in mind and improve day-to-day activities such as social interactions, clinical consultations, live media, and public service announcements.

State and local governments (SLGs) are constantly looking for ways to improve the lives and well-being of their constituents. They strive for increased efficiencies in delivering existing government services or potential new services such as those related to assistance with food, health, education, affordable housing, weatherization, and more. Enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions, along with ancillary business systems that support performance-based budgeting, play a key role in providing data insights. The balancing act between tight budgets and enablement of government services is enabled by fiscal health, sound policies, and data insights. ERP systems deployed on the cloud can help with the capabilities and technology tools that governments need to derive efficiencies with existing services and deploy new services.

Addressing climate change requires innovation across the world, across industries, and across startups and multi-national corporations. From distributed energy to storage solutions to efficiency and optimization software—clean technology investment and innovation is surging. With this surge in demand comes a rapid proliferation of startups working to solve today’s biggest energy challenges. To help foster this innovation, AWS is launching the AWS Clean Energy Accelerator.

Even before the pandemic, many people were rent burdened, with a quarter of renters paying more than half their income on rent. US Congress approved two bills containing $45 billion for emergency rental assistance programs (ERAP) that states and local governments can use to support people in need. Distributing these funds quickly and efficiently requires local agencies to rapidly design and deploy new engagement models, programs, and workflows that are easy to use, that can quickly scale up to meet demand, and are flexible enough to adjust to changes in federal and local requirements. Learn how these AWS customers and partners are leveraging the cloud to quickly launch and distribute benefit assistance programs like emergency rental assistance.