Category: Public Sector

As we continue to work with public sector bodies around the world, AWS understands how valuable open source software and development communities are at this time. To accelerate the combined global response to COVID-19, we gathered examples of third-party open code, tools, and standards that reformers in the public sector can immediately use. We’ve included these in a new resource now available in Open Government Solutions.

The annual AWS Public Sector Summit is now an online experience. At the virtual event, developers can build their own agenda, choosing between two session tracks as well as multiple virtual booths, zones, and activities. If you’re a developer who has registered or are thinking about registering, here’s what you need to know.

Streetlives, a nonprofit organization based in New York City, uses technology to host a community-built web app for people who are homeless, communities considered vulnerable, and social service providers in New York City (NYC). Streetlives is a community-built mobile website that enables people who are homeless or in poverty to easily find, rate, and recommend social services across New York City. Adam Bard, Founder of Streetlives, explains how AWS Promotional Credits helps the organization deliver up-to-date, validated social service information to the communities of New York City.

Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) is now generally available in AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. Now government organizations and commercial organizations in government-regulated industries who adopt Kubernetes as their standard for orchestrating containers can use Amazon EKS to deploy a managed Kubernetes cluster on AWS. According to the 2019 Cloud Native Computing Foundation survey of their community, Amazon EKS is the leading method for deploying Kubernetes.

The COVID-19 Healthcare Coalition is a private-sector led response to COVID-19 that brings together healthcare organizations, technology firms, nonprofits, academia, and startups to preserve the healthcare delivery system and help protect U.S. populations. AWS is a member of the COVID-19 Healthcare Coalition, working side by side with leading healthcare providers and researchers such as the Mayo Clinic, Johns Hopkins, and ZocDoc. Together, we’re coordinating our collective expertise, capabilities, and data to provide insights to improve clinical outcomes.

One of the most difficult aspects in IT modernization in any industry—especially in highly regulated ones like government, financial services, and healthcare—can be getting data securely from on premises to the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud. In capital markets, moving fast while staying secure can determine an organization’s ability to modernize, optimize, and innovate with new technologies such as data lakes, big data analytics, and machine learning.

With most everyone off campus, parent and student communications are top of mind for school districts and universities. Amazon Alexa can help extend the classroom to home through integrations with commonly used education technology applications. Now Amazon Alexa can aggregate information across education skills into one response, creating a faster, streamlined, more convenient way to access information.

Across recent customer engagements, our teams have seen an increase in requests for support in four key use cases: remote workforce and productivity, citizen engagement, data management and analytics, and operational resilience and business continuity. Today I want to share a few stories of success where customers have implemented AWS services to address these use cases. They address four of the most urgent IT issues facing public sector customers in the crisis.

Getting started with the cloud can be challenging, but it doesn’t have to be. The first step is understanding the basics. Learn what the cloud is, how it works, and its benefits. Next, learn the different types of cloud computing and the foundational cloud services to help get you started making sense of large amounts of data, innovating quicker, handling sudden changes in demand, and more.

In April 2020, the AWS Public Sector Blog covered stories on AWS launching machine learning enabled search capabilities for COVID-19 dataset, supporting healthcare with technology in response to COVID-19, and building a chatbot for your school in less than an hour. For more blog highlights from this month, you can also check out The Brief, hosted this month by Ray Rogers, the host of the Fix This podcast.