Category: Government

In June 2019, Naval Information Warfare Center Pacific (NIWC PAC) awarded AWS the first Blanket Purchase Agreement (BPA) in the US DoD for DoD Cloud Computing Security Requirements Guide IL-6 cloud services. This BPA allows for Navy customers to bring the benefits of commercial cloud to Secret workloads. In 2020, NIWC PAC made available the first AWS Secret Region IL-6 environment available for both internal customers residing on the NIWC PAC Secret Wide Area Network (SWAN) and external DoD and U.S. Department of the Navy customers. To support external customers, NIWC PAC deployed SkyDesk, a Citrix Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) solution that allows any SIPRNet terminal to connect and access the NR&DE IL-6 Cloud.

I recently had the opportunity to record the keynote for this year’s AWS Public Sector Summit Online. This year’s keynote theme is “Inspiration Everywhere,” and I can’t wait to share a number of inspiring stories and examples from our customers with you when the keynote airs on April 15. What unites all of the stories is a commitment to achieving mission outcomes with AWS and cloud computing. And while we’ll spend some time talking about the technology, I’ll also share with you the organizational changes that mission owners can drive, today, to move fast, be responsive, and maximize the impact of limited resources.

At AWS, we place a high priority on innovation. And innovation is best served by a diverse team, which is why we support organizations like Girls in Tech, a global nonprofit of more than 70,000 members, that advocates for diversity, equality, and inclusion in the technology industry. A report from NCWIT found that women earned 57% of all bachelor’s degrees in 2019, yet only 21% of computer and information sciences bachelor’s degrees. And while women hold 57% of all professional occupations in the US workforce, they hold only 26% of all computing occupations. And, the numbers of women in STEM drop down to the low single digits when you look at BIPOC women. It is clear—the time for change is now.

According to the IFC, small business ownership in South Africa reflects patterns of racial and gender-based inequality in the broader South African society, and as the size of businesses grows, the rates of black and female ownership decline. At AWS, we believe that building diverse teams allows us to innovate better for our customers. To work toward this, in 2019, AWS South Africa launched the AWS Equity Equivalent Investment Program (AWS EEIP), as part of its Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment (B-BBEE) program. The AWS EEIP is a Partner development and acceleration program for 100% black owned small IT businesses in South Africa. Applications for the 2021 intake are now open.

In the spring of 2019, environmental modelers at the Lake Michigan Air Directors Consortium (LADCO) had a new problem to solve. Emerging research on air pollution along the shores of the Great Lakes in the United States showed that to properly simulate the pollution episodes in the region we needed to apply our models at a finer spatial granularity than the computational capacity of our in-house HPC cluster could handle. The LADCO modelers turned to AWS ParallelCluster to access the HPC resources needed to do this modeling faster and scale for our member states.

The era of the cloud has simply accelerated the push to microservices as organizations want to adopt new, distributed models for building applications to drive agility, innovation, and efficiency. The AWS portfolio of purpose-built databases can help with this movement. AWS offers a broad and deep portfolio of purpose-built databases that support diverse data models and allow customers to build data driven, highly scalable, distributed applications. This allows you to pick the best database to solve a specific problem and break away from restrictive commercial databases to focus on building applications to meet the needs of their organization.

Join us at the upcoming AWS Public Sector Summit Online (April 15-16, 2021) where attendees will have the opportunity to test their knowledge and learn new skills in the AWS Jam Lounge and virtual workshops. Put your skills to the test in the AWS Jam Lounge (Sponsored by Intel and Fortinet) and learn something new by attending virtual workshops

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.

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.

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.