Category: Security, Identity, & Compliance

In September 2022, the State of Arizona Department of Homeland Security (AZDOHS) launched a new program to bolster the cybersecurity of Arizona’s most vulnerable cities, counties, and K12 school districts. The Arizona Statewide Cyber Readiness Grant Program enables local entities to reduce their cyberattack surface by accessing technical assistance and software licenses across five functional areas. The Cyber Grant Task Force selected two software providers from the AWS Marketplace hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS), Tanium and CrowdStrike to assist cities, counties, and schools with improving their cybersecurity posture.

AWS announced that Amazon Connect, its omnichannel cloud contact center service, has achieved FedRAMP Authorized status at the High Impact Level. FedRAMP is a US government-wide program that promotes the adoption of secure cloud services across the federal government by providing a standardized approach to security and risk assessment, and continuous monitoring for cloud technologies and federal agencies. In this blog post, learn how to deploy a secure Amazon Connect contact center with conversational AI features to route callers and chatters to the agents best able to assist them.

Virtually all federal, state, and local government agencies are subject to various data retention and records management policies, regulations, and laws. AWS Wickr provides federal agencies with an innovative solution that can help them build public trust by protecting sensitive communications, while supporting the capture and management of records.  

State and local government organizations are experiencing an increase in cyber incidents that impact and disrupt citizen services. In 2021, US President Joe Biden signed the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA), which created the State and Local Cybersecurity Grant Program (SLCGP) to provide funding to eligible entities to address cybersecurity risks and threats to information systems owned or operated by, or on behalf of, state, local, or tribal governments. This blog post guides you through some resources and approaches to consider as organizations strive to meet the SLCGP funding requirements.

The US Office of Management and Budget published M-21-31, a memorandum for federal government agencies to define event logging requirements related to cybersecurity incidents. These guidelines aim to support the detection, investigation, and remediation of cyber incidents on federal information systems. The memorandum defines various event logging (EL) tiers and the log data that must be captured for various log categories. Learn the services from AWS that have been called out explicitly in the memorandum for logging and retention requirements at the EL1 level, and the resources you can use to set up these services to capture the required log data.

Public sector organizations around the world share a common concern: how can they make sure their digital transformation maintains data security? The question comes up often when I meet with government leaders around the world in my role as a government transformation digital advisor at AWS. During my time in the UK Government’s Digital Service (GDS), and now in my work with government leaders, I’ve learned important lessons about transforming services securely in the cloud. Read on for some key takeaways.

Cybersecurity analytics is a systematic methodology designed to collect, ingest, process, aggregate, and analyze security events. This methodology empowers organizations to proactively perform security investigations, powered by advanced analytics and machine learning (ML), which help mitigate cyber issues more effectively and efficiently at scale. Learn about the core components of a cybersecurity analytics framework and how organizations can use AWS to design a cybersecurity analytics platform with analytics and ML services.

At Amazon, we believe cybersecurity skills training and workforce development are essential to addressing cybersecurity challenges. Leading into Cybersecurity Awareness Month, Amazon hosted Jen Easterly, director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), for a roundtable with leaders across higher education, state and local government, and private industry to discuss ways to develop the cybersecurity workforce through skills training, partnerships between government and industry, and creating pathways to cybersecurity careers. Learn more about how Amazon supports cybersecurity training.

It is essential for election campaigns and committees to have access to the latest security services so they can mitigate risks against security threats at minimal cost. To support this, AWS is collaborating with Defending Digital Campaigns (DDC) to offer more than 20 cybersecurity-related AWS services for low-to-no cost to all active and registered national party committees and federal candidate committees for the US House and US Senate midterm elections that are eligible in accordance with DDC and Federal Election Commission (FEC) criteria.

AWS announced the availability of Wickr RAM (Recall, Alert and Messaging) to the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) through Cloud One, which is a cloud hosting infrastructure and service. Wickr RAM is an end-to-end encrypted full suite collaboration application built for the warfighter. It is available on AWS GovCloud (US) and can support workloads up to Impact Level 5.