Category: Government

In its first week, more than 400 attendees came through the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Federal Pop-Up Loft in Arlington, Virginia to attend training sessions, utilize co-working space, ask questions at the expert bar, and more. The loft, a community space for federal employees and partners, is open through September 18. Register for technical sessions, stop by any day from 8:30am-4:30pm to ask one of our experts a question, co-work, or network with peers and colleagues.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) and the Disruptive Innovators Network (DIN) hosted the first competitive social housing hackathon this past May in London. Four UK housing associations – including Great Places, Places for People and Metropolitan Thames Valley – were teamed with members of the AWS Partner Network (APN), and had 36 hours to analyse one of four housing problems and hack a solution.

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) is currently migrating their systems to a cloud architecture. Mason McDaniel, chief technology officer at ATF, spoke with Government Matters at the AWS Public Sector Summit in Washington, DC about the status of their current cloud migration efforts. Watch the full interview with Mason McDaniel to learn more about ATF’s cloud migration strategy, the importance of automation, and how IT modernization helped them modernize their mission.

The AWS Public Sector Partner (PSP) Program now has more than 1,000 members who are demonstrating their commitment to working with government, education, and nonprofit customers around the globe. The program’s success is reflected in the revenue growth of participating partners who increased profits compared to partners not in the program.

Amazon EC2 Spot Instances are now available in Amazon Web Services (AWS) GovCloud (US) Regions. AWS GovCloud (US) is Amazon’s isolated cloud infrastructure and services designed to address specific regulatory and compliance requirements of US Government agencies, as well as contractors, educational institutions, and other US customers that run sensitive workloads in the cloud. With Amazon EC2 Spot Instances, AWS GovCloud (US) customers can take advantage of the largest pool of cost-effective compute capacity in the world, while realizing savings up to 90% compared to on-demand prices. Spot Instances provide acceleration, scale, and cost savings that are ideal for fault-tolerant, flexible, loosely coupled, and stateless workloads.

One of the U.S. Intelligence Community’s biggest events is the annual Department of Defense Intelligence Information System (DoDIIS) Conference. In August, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) brought together over 3,700 experts and innovators from government and industry at DoDIIS to share their insights on this year’s conference theme – Resiliency, Redundancy and Security: Adapting to Asymmetric Threats. For years, Amazon Web Services (AWS) has helped the federal government harness the power of the cloud to transform its mission and create a better world by enabling rapid sourcing, enrichment, and analysis of massive amounts of global data to reveal insight and actionable intelligence.

From the first AWS Federal Pop-Up Loft to choices for your hybrid cloud connectivity, read our top blog posts from August.

Amazon Comprehend Medical is a natural language processing (NLP) service that simplifies the use of machine learning (ML) to extract relevant medical information from unstructured text often found in clinical charts or doctor’s notes. Since the service launched in the AWS Canada (Central) Region in June 2019, it opened up possibilities for Canadian healthcare organizations to better serve patients. Vancouver General Hospital (VGH) and University of British Columbia (UBC) researchers are among the organizations who leverage Amazon Comprehend Medical and Amazon SageMaker, to create their own machine learning models that can triage x-rays to provide a better healthcare experience.

Smartsheet, a cloud-based platform for work execution, recently announced Smartsheet Gov achieved a Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) Provisional Authority to Operate (P-ATO). Smartsheet Gov is a secure solution that enables federal agencies to organize and scale processes, streamline workflows, and automate repetitive yet critical tasks, built on Amazon Web Services (AWS) GovCloud (US). The Joint Authorization Board (JAB)-issued authorization enables U.S. federal government customers to increase their use of the Smartsheet Gov platform to help them modernize their IT missions. “By building on AWS GovCloud, Smartsheet and their government customers may host sensitive data and regulated workloads, while meeting stringent US government security and compliance requirements,” said Dave Levy, Vice President of U.S. Federal Government at AWS.

At the AWS Public Sector Summit in Canberra, Australia, more than 1,300 technologists convened to learn about digital transformation through cloud technologies, and were able to get inspired, dive deep, and begin to build. Keynote speakers highlighted the impact AWS can have on the individual, society, security, government, and the economy in the Australia and New Zealand region.