Category: Public Sector

AWS is launching the AWS Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification (CMMC) Customer Responsibility Matrix (CRM). The AWS CMMC CRM reduces the level of effort required for CMMC compliance by providing customers a breakdown of the CMMC practices that they can inherit from AWS, and identifies CMMC practice roles and responsibilities when using the AWS Compliant Framework for Federal and DoD Workloads in AWS GovCloud (US).

The AWS Summit – Washington, DC keynote will be hosted by Max Peterson, vice president of public sector at AWS. Peterson will take a look at the latest innovative advancements happening across the public sector and share key learnings on how organizations can continue to push boundaries with the cloud. Learn more about the inspiring guest speakers who will join him on stage to explain how they are leveraging the cloud to further drive their missions.

President Biden’s executive order emphasizes the need to elevate information security as a core tenet of national security, and calls on federal agencies and public sector organizations to work with the private sector to prioritize the data security and privacy of the American people and government. AWS and AWS Partners can help government agencies align with the initiatives in this executive order.

AWS will open a new data centre design facility in Zagreb, Croatia. The new facility is part of AWS’s ongoing commitment to Croatia, which also includes team expansion to support the growing number of customers and Partners. The new centre will support development and operation of AWS Cloud services, with a focus on data centre design, product development, and research.

The Barnes Foundation is home to a legendary art collection, including some of the world’s most important impressionist, post-impressionist, and modern paintings. At the core of its mission is the advancement of education and art appreciation. When the COVID-19 pandemic shut down in-person tours and classes, the Barnes Foundation used the cloud to quickly pivot to develop and launch new online programming to continue to deliver their educational mission, and allowed them to triple enrollment in online courses for adults and reach 40 percent more school-age students during the 2020-2021 school year compared to in-person courses in pre-pandemic years.

After Rockdale County, Georgia was the victim of two cyber attacks, the jurisdiction turned to the cloud to strengthen the county’s security position. They worked with AWS Partner Tyler Technologies, Inc. to help with their migration, which not only enhanced data security and continuity of operations, but also reduced network downtime by 99 percent, while streamlining budgeting and reducing the IT staff’s burden.

The AWS Startup Ramp is a program for early-stage startups building solutions in health, digital government, smart cities, agriculture, and space technology, and is dedicated to supporting entrepreneurs as they build, launch, and grow. AWS Startup Ramp works to remove barriers for entrepreneurs who want to make an impact in the public sector by providing technical design and architecture reviews, mentorship, credits, and support with go-to-market plans to help navigate the complex regulatory and security requirements in the public sector.

The Allen Institute seeks to understand how our brains, cells, and immune systems work when we are healthy and, ultimately, how they go wrong in disease. Allen researchers have generated and shared atlases that map the brain, gene-edited stem cell lines, and many more resources that have been used by millions of scientists around the world to accelerate their research. In collaboration with AWS and the Registry of Open Data on AWS, they make many of their datasets publicly available. In celebration of Open Science Week, check out some of these open datasets from the Allen Institute, and their impact on the research community.

In the immediate aftermath of a natural disaster, cell towers, power lines, and telephone and internet cable are often damaged or destroyed, limiting the ability for responders to share data and access the internet. The AWS Disaster Response team conducted a field testing operation designed to replicate a common disaster response scenario, to show how to establish an ad-hoc network at field sites with limited connectivity and create a link to an office headquarters to provide access to cloud-based resources and data to responders in the field.

Accreditation programs and the organizational models that support them are priority considerations for public sector managers who are modernizing their IT. But managers often consider risk and compliance issues too late in the planning stage. Here are some key principles that can prevent accreditation-related issues from becoming a roadblock to cloud adoption.