Category: Government

The winners of the annual AWS City on a Cloud Innovation Challenge were announced today at re:Invent 2019. The annual competition recognizes applicants going above and beyond to innovate for and with their constituents, using the cloud to improve lives. Congratulations to the 18 winners!

FINRA CAT, LLC, a subsidiary of Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA), announced today it has selected Amazon Web Services (AWS) as its cloud provider for the Consolidated Audit Trail (CAT). The CAT will allow regulators to improve securities market surveillance by creating an extensive audit trail of order information for all U.S. equity securities and listed options across U.S. markets and trading venues. Leveraging AWS’s storage, compute, database, analytics, and security services, CAT ingests more than 100 billion market events per day, pulling together data from 22 stock exchanges and 1,500 broker dealer firms, enabling the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and Self-Regulatory Organizations (SROs) to analyze CAT data.

Fix This, a new podcast by Amazon Web Services (AWS), is now available for streaming and download on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Spotify, Stitcher, TuneIn, Overcast, iHeartRadio, and via RSS. Fix This is a bi-weekly podcast of bite-sized stories about how tech makes the world a better place. Leaders from around the globe share how they use technology to fix some of the world’s most pressing issues.

Today at re:Invent 2019 in Las Vegas, more than 100 innovative leaders from more than 60 different companies who are part of the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Partner Network (APN) came together to collaborate, learn, and recognize contributions to the public sector. This year, we introduced the AWS Public Sector Competency and Region Awards. The winners were selected based on their success within their AWS Competency, demonstration of Amazon Leadership Principles, engagement and success with the APN, and delivery of results in a customer obsessed way.

From studying messages from the universe to building a bulldog bot, check out what you missed in November on the AWS Public Sector Blog.

re:Invent 2019 is next week! Are you still filling out your schedule? Remember that reserved seating is now available for some sessions. Consider these can’t-miss sessions for the public sector.

Parsons Corporation, an Amazon Web Services (AWS) Partner Network (APN) Advanced Consulting Partner, announced 10 semi-finalists in the first Parsons Smart Cities Challenge. The competition, titled Transforming Intersections, will award the winning city with a year of support and services to help increase mobility around cities and reduce the amount of time citizens spend at red lights.

The sixth annual City on a Cloud Innovation Challenge opened new categories to highlight innovative customers that are driving actionable change for the benefit of constituents. The competition includes categories for constituent services, solving persistent problems, sustainability and equity, powered by AWS, dream big, and public datasets. The competition received more than 100 nominee use cases that highlighted how AWS customers are using the cloud to innovate and improve the lives of constituents.

To keep up with rapid technological advancement and the new world of work, current and future generations of leaders should be equipped with the right skills and mindset. Innovating in classrooms and beyond and creating citizen-centric services means taking advantage of the latest technology. It also means empowering the people who build and use it. AWS created resources that demonstrate paths to achieving a more diverse and prepared workforce – and how tech can help.

To help solve a few challenges I faced with my family, including the need to track the location of a child, I needed a serverless global positioning system (GPS) monitoring solution. Commercial geographic monitoring GPS solutions are not cost-effective because of the cost of digital map licenses from third parties and running servers around the clock. Existing GPS systems work with proprietary GPS devices that lock-in the users’ vendors’ devices. My solution? Build my own serverless GPS monitoring and alerting solution.