AWS Public Sector Blog

Category: Government

blockchain finance digital currency

The future of money is digital: How the cloud can deliver solutions for central bank digital currencies

Increasingly, central banks want to answer practical questions and make the technology choices involved to deliver a central bank digital currency (CBDC). They need a solution that delivers on their missions and meets the performance criteria required to support a stable monetary and financial system. To help organizations understand available technology options and see how cloud services can enable optimal solution designs, AWS authored a two-part whitepaper. Here are some of the highlights.

2021_Public Sector Summit

Announcing the keynote speakers for the 2021 AWS Public Sector Summit Online

The AWS Public Sector Summit Online is happening April 15-16, 2021. Registration is open and no cost. Teresa Carlson, vice president of AWS worldwide public sector and industries, will host the keynote featuring inspiring leaders who are delivering on their missions with AWS. Now, more than ever, organizations have to be agile, intuitive, and innovative. In the keynote address, Teresa will take a look at breakthroughs happening across the public sector globally and discuss how public sector organizations like yours can continue to push boundaries.

Building the first quantum computing applications lab in India

The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) in India is establishing a Quantum Computing Applications Lab, in collaboration with AWS, to accelerate quantum computing-led research and development and enable new scientific discoveries. This is MeitY’s first initiative in the country to provide scientific, academic, and developer communities with access to a quantum computing development environment in the cloud. This is also the first quantum computing applications lab on AWS Cloud to support a government’s science and technology mission at a country level.

Hurricane imagery acquired by NOAA RSD

Open data helps recovery in the aftermath of devastating weather events

Severe and extreme weather events not only wreak havoc on lives, property and the economy, but the extent of the destruction and devastation left behind can be difficult to map and quantify. Having high resolution imagery of areas devastated by weather events (hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, and etc.) helps to characterize impacts, formulate needed recovery and response activities, support emergency managers in saving lives, and restart the flow of commerce. NOAA’s data plays a critical role in this process. As part of ASDI, we invited Jena Kent from NOAA’s Big Data Program to share how AWS is helping with disaster response by providing access to aerial data and imagery through open data initiatives.

blue check mark encircled on dark blue computer background

Using AWS for compliance with Internal Revenue Service (IRS) Publication 1075

Internal Revenue Service Publication 1075 (IRS 1075) provides guidance for US government agencies, agents, and contractors that access Federal Tax Information (FTI), to make sure they use policies, practices, controls, and safeguards to protect FTI confidentiality and integrity of FTI throughout its lifecycle. Safeguarding FTI is critical to agencies that receive, process, store or transmit FTI. AWS and AWS Partner programs enable agencies to protect FTI and the confidential relationship between the taxpayer and the IRS.

Baltimore harbor at sunset

Addressing housing barriers with the cloud: Baltimore launches My Digital Data Locker

Removing the barriers to rehousing, especially for those chronically homeless, is a critical part of a community’s efforts to combat homelessness. This month, the City of Baltimore is launching My Digital Data Locker, an innovative cloud-based platform that gives people who are experiencing homelessness a secure place to manage digital copies of vital documents. This service reduces one of the key barriers to housing for people experiencing homelessness: vital document storage and access. The solution uses the cloud.

two women discuss something on a laptop in front of a whiteboard

What gives me hope on International Women’s Day

When I travel around the world, I try to spend time with women leaders in different organizations, industries, and walks of life. In the time we have together, I try to learn about their hopes and dreams. In those conversations, I hear both a desire to think big about the future and a struggle to balance the commitments and responsibilities that fall almost exclusively to women. The numbers are clear: the percentage of the women participating in the global labor force is declining. I recently wrote about steps we can take to recover from the last year. Today, I want to share three stories that make me hopeful that we can collectively achieve gender parity. 

aerial view of laptop, gloves, mask, and hand sanitizer

Canadian government department serves public sector employees and organizations using AI-powered chatbot

As populations continue to grow, government departments around the world are exploring new ways to scale their delivery of client services. The Public Services Health & Safety Association (PSHSA), a transfer payment agency of the Ontario government’s Ministry of Labour Training and Skills Development, turned to an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered chatbot to better serve customers by addressing their occupational health and safety training and consulting questions.

Encryption in transit for public sector

Encryption-in-transit for public sector workloads with AWS Nitro Enclaves and AWS Certificate Manager

Government, education, nonprofit, healthcare, and other public sector organizations process and store sensitive data including health records, tax data, PII, student data, criminal justice information, and financial data. These workloads carry stringent security and compliance requirements to protect the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of this data both in transit and at rest. Best practices for protection of data in transit include enforcing appropriately defined encryption requirements, authenticating network communications, and implementing secure key and certificate management systems. In this post, I demonstrate a solution for deploying a highly available and fault tolerant web service with managed certificates and TLS termination performed on customer-managed EC2 Nitro instances using ACM for Nitro Enclaves.

two women working on laptop

People’s Association in Singapore improves upskilling experiences for communities

People around the world rely on continuing education and upskilling courses to build on their existing knowledge and learn new, industry-specific skills sets. In Singapore, Community Centres (CCs) and Resident Committees (RCs) offer a variety of upskilling courses for residents. CCs and RCs are part of the network of the People’s Association (PA), a Singaporean statutory board with a mission to build and bridge communities. To improve CCs’ and RCs’ time-intensive, manual process of course administration, PA and Amazon Web Services (AWS) Partner, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), launched a cloud-based web portal in November 2019.