Category: Government

Governments around the world want to accelerate their digital transformation to offer simpler access to citizen services online and earn trust with effective solutions. This includes things like being able to send notifications to users, providing a single log-in for government services, or publishing public health information in the wake of a pandemic. The AWS Government Transformation Team is here to help. We highlight available solutions and build new open source solutions that governments can leverage. Before developing new software, establishing a foundation with a sound design system is an important first step so our solutions are consistent, accessible, and simple to use. Read on to learn more about why starting with an open source design system is important and how we selected one for the software we’ve built and will build in the future.

At re:Invent 2020, Teresa Carlson, vice president and leader of AWS public sector and industry business units, shared stories of how cloud technology has proven critical for organizations to move fast and respond to a new reality shaped by COVID-19. Teresa also welcomed customers UK Biobank, Capella Space, and Wefarm to share their own experiences with solving some of the world’s most pressing challenges using the cloud. Here are 10 key takeaways that show what’s next for the public sector.

The COVID-19 pandemic pressed organizations to virtualize events that would have previously been held in person, like town halls, school board meetings, public health announcements, and more. While larger organizations may have existing media departments, smaller organizations have had to find ways to utilize social media and other consumer-grade resources to stream these events online. This post walks through how to use AWS Elemental MediaLive to stream to Facebook Live and YouTube Live using an AWS CloudFormation stack to stand up resources automatically.

AWS re:Invent is back for 2020, and for the first time it’s all virtual and free. AWS re:Invent has become the world’s premier cloud learning event, and this year, we’ll feature sessions focused on how public sector organizations are using the cloud to improve the lives of constituents, patients, customers, and more. The event, kicking off on November 30 and lasting three weeks through December 18, will feature keynotes, leadership sessions, lightning talks, and core sessions tailored for the public sector. To help you make the most of re:Invent 2020, we created the AWS re:Invent Public Sector Virtual Attendee Guide, and the latest episode of The Brief.

The COVID-19 pandemic is driving a parallel “infodemic”: the rapid spread of competing and often harmful narratives about the virus. Social media plays a central role in this infodemic, serving as a forum for the spread and evolution of theories and beliefs with origins in broadcast, print, online news, blogs, and other digital arenas. As the COVID-19 infodemic grew, Novetta used AWS to create Rapid Narrative Analysis (RNA), a solution that achieves accuracy by using human expertise at critical stages of analysis while using machine learning (ML) models to rapidly diagnose the severity of the spread of key narratives at a speed needed to take effective action.

AWS IAM Identity Center helps administrators centrally manage access to multiple AWS accounts that are members of an AWS Organization. End users can authenticate and then access all their AWS accounts from a single interface. Using IAM Identity Center as a SAML identity provider for your AWS accounts also has security benefits: user credentials provided via federation are temporary. IAM Identity Center does not automatically detect AWS GovCloud (US) accounts associated with standard AWS accounts in your AWS Organization. IAM Identity Center is also not currently available in AWS GovCloud (US). As a result, IAM Identity Center cannot be used to automatically provision access for your users into an AWS GovCloud (US) account. However, this functionality can be extended to enable federation into AWS GovCloud (US) with a “custom SAML 2.0 application” in IAM Identity Center.

To better support the growing use of cloud computing resources with increasing data- and compute-intensive research and education workloads, the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) announced the Cloud Access solicitation in September 2018. The NSF, through its competitive merit review process, selected CloudBank. Researchers that use CloudBank gain access to advanced hardware resources such as CPUs, GPUs, FPGAs, ASICs, and quantum processing units (QPUs). In addition, CloudBank offers proposal assistance, facilitated cloud access and account management, monitoring and resource usage optimization, and eliminates university overhead/indirect costs, and provides curated training materials, classroom, and help desk support.

At the AWS Nonprofit Hackathon for Good, 484 participants built solutions to help relieve the burden on developers in the government who are facing increasing demands on their systems during COVID-19. Hackathon participants were tasked with improving the workflows of the frontline developers who maintain mission-critical COBOL applications. The winning solution created an integrated developer environment (IDE) extension for COBOL syntax highlighting, and is now available in the VS Code Marketplace.

In a world where data is produced and handled at unprecedented speeds and quantities, the need for effective methods to securely store, analyze, and interpret this data is more important now than ever. As agencies within the U.S. Department of Defense and Intelligence Community turn to cloud adoption, they are able to bring new capabilities closer to the tactical edge and accelerate their digital transformation. Agencies can effectively leverage these new technologies such as AI, ML, and data analytics to free up time and resources for warfighters and analysts to focus on mission critical tasks.

In celebration of Veterans Day, we connected with Marla Bradbury, an Amazon Web Services (AWS) employee, Veteran, and former United States Army pilot. Read on to learn about her military career and what led her to Amazon as well as advice for transitioning military.