Category: State or Local Government

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.

Public sector organizations—from state and local governments, to nonprofits, federal, and defense agencies—often ask us, “How does Amazon innovate?” Our approach centers on four pillars that help us innovate on behalf of our customers: culture, mechanisms, architecture, and organization.

Many government customers use AWS GovCloud (US) because it provides an environment for sensitive data and regulated workloads by addressing a number of U.S. government security and compliance requirements. In many cases, customers have a number of AWS GovCloud (US) accounts and managing authentication and authorization can require a lot of work. These customers may also use Microsoft Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) for identity management, single sign-on (SSO), and multi-factor authentication (MFA). This post builds on features and functionality announced earlier by demonstrating the necessary steps to configure Azure AD, AWS SSO, and the AWS GovCloud (US)-specific identity provider centrally for ease of management.

State and local governments and health and human services (HHS) agencies provide key services to the nation’s most vulnerable and at risk populations such as healthcare, nutrition, economic, and other social support programs. HHS organizations were among the first to feel the impact of COVID-19 and its effects continue to linger and test aging infrastructure and limited technology systems. State and local government agencies made mission critical decisions to address those immediate needs and are preparing for resiliency moving forward. For this, they turned to the cloud. To help organizations discover how the cloud can help, Amazon Web Services (AWS) created the Health and Human Services Cloud Pavilion, an online, interactive learning environment.

At the AWS Public Sector Summit Online, Max Peterson, vice president of international sales for the public sector, spoke about our new reality responding to a global pandemic—and how customers who have taken steps to transform digitally are already benefiting from their progress. Through the lens of customers’ and partners’ experience, Max shared lessons learned and how to apply these lessons to your cloud journey. Those four key lessons? Move fast, have an agile platform, keep innovating, and think big. Read on for more.

Governments, like the state government of California, are in the midst of a transition to a new way of delivering vital information, services and programs using technology and the cloud. Government organizations are adopting approaches pioneered in the technology industry, including user-centered design, agile development, data science, modular contracting, and the use of modern technology platforms. Many of these governments, like the state of California, are using Amazon Web Services (AWS) to respond quickly and scale to battle unprecedented challenges, like COVID-19, and help them quickly make decisions about how to protect their constituents.

The AWS Public Sector Summit Online is happening October 20, 2020—registration is now open and at no cost. Max Peterson, vice president of international sales of worldwide public sector at AWS, is hosting the opening keynote, featuring inspiring stories from leaders who are serving their missions with AWS. In the keynote, Max will also share insights into emerging trends in the public sector and discuss topics around digital transformation, business continuity, resilience, security, and privacy—as well as training and workforce development. Meet the inspiring leaders featured in the keynote and learn a bit about their stories.

Azavea believes in the power of geospatial technology to improve communities and the planet. Azavea has been exploring the power of this technology to help their clients to answer complex questions in a wide range of domains from urban ecosystems, infrastructure planning, and economic development to water, energy, and climate change. As part of the Amazon Sustainability Data Initiative (ASDI), we invited Jessica Cahail, product manager at Azavea, to share how her organization is using AWS and open data to develop tools that help users address environmental challenges and deliver knowledge to support decision making.

Governments at all levels rapidly addressed the rising challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic. Canadian governments  met citizens’ needs quickly by building secure, compliant solutions on AWS to deliver critical information and services. Working with partners and AWS, Canadian governments and agencies released multiple solutions for providing a modern, digital-first experience for all to interact with the government and receive the information and services they need.

Efforts to prevent and combat homelessness are limited by the lack of comprehensive data about people experiencing homelessness. This makes it difficult for states to identify trends and emerging needs to respond and make data-driven decisions about the effective deployment of resources. The cloud can help bridge information silos. Read on for examples of how states use the cloud to bridge data silos and better serve the homeless.